Forum Issue (Minor): Two Clicks Required to Start YouTube Videos

Duane Degn

I notice when I want to play recently embedded YouTube videos it takes two clicks to before the video will play. Some of the older YouTube links will play with a single click.
I think the difference is related to the way the forum software adds the video tags.
The video below was added by pasting this text without the spaces or quotes. "[v ideo=y outube;f520FM9Z9is]h ttps://w ww.youtube.com/watch?v=f520FM9Z9is[/v ideo]"
Edit: The link didn't work. I pasted the text from this forum post but the video wasn't embedded properly here.

The video below was added by pasting the following text (again without the quotes or spaces). "h ttps://w ww.youtube.com/w atch?v=25Gt31mT7g8"


I think the later example looks better on the screen but I prefer the first version (as seen in the other thread) since it only requires one click to play the video.

Publison

Duane, I have noticed that has always happened in Chrome (two clicks). Perhaps another browser does not do that?

Tor

In Android the first click seems to "load" the video (the youtube ornamentations appear), and the second click can then start it.

Duane Degn

Duane, I have noticed that has always happened in Chrome (two clicks). Perhaps another browser does not do that?



Did you check the video in the other thread?
Here again is the link to the thread with an one click video (this line is a link).
This Let's Make Robot's page has the same embedded video with can be played with a single click.
(When links take up a whole line they're a bit more obvious. I still think links are hard to see.)

Courtney Jacobs

I'll add this as a side-note to the video posting issue already on the list.

Thanks.

GordonMcComb

The first image is to a poster frame, merely a low-bandwidth JPG. The first click loads the actual video; the second click runs the video.
There are probably ways around it, but to load the video up front goes against Google/YouTube's best practice suggestions for mobile users. Loading even a video in paused state requires a lot of round trips, and of course more bandwidth. For the HTML5-based player, it also takes longer to build the canvas and set up the page, which delays the display.
An option would be to script the clicking of the poster frame to also play the video, so you're back to one click. There's probably something in the YouTube API that allows this.  Another would be to figure out how to avoid the forum rewriting it to its format.
I'm going to do a quick test below, using some Chris Lloyd brilliance for inspiration...



Nope...sorry...the rewriting of the link seems to be at the output parsing stage. Still, enjoy the clip.

Duane Degn

The first image is to a poster frame, merely a low-bandwidth JPG. The first click loads the actual video; the second click runs the video.

Thanks Gordon. That makes more sense.
I think the poster frame looks good but I find myself expecting the video to play with the first click. Hopefully the IT folks can incorporate your suggestion to get the videos to load and play with a single click.
I imagine I'll get used to the two click thing if it doesn't change. It's certainly not a big deal.

GordonMcComb

Looking closer at the CSS and monitoring the network elements it does indeed appear they are lazy loading the video. The video player and its elements are not loaded until you click on the poster frame.
Some code I ran across on GitHub makes it look like there are issues JavaScripting the autoplay on some mobile devices. Maybe that's why they kept it simple here.

Duane Degn

The Lockitron video on Adafruit looks like it uses a similar poster frame but it plays with one click. The poster frame doesn't look exactly the same as the one here but pretty close.
https://www.adafruit.com/products/2579

Duane Degn

What is this thread sunk?
At least tell us when a thread gets sunk!

Ding-Batty

Apparently, this thread was sunk. See this thread.

Heater.

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