How to detect when Chrome's "click-to-play" Flash blocking feature is currently active

Question

Tracking state of Chrome's Click-to-play feature

How do you detect that a Flash plugin has been temporarily disabled, or, conversely, detect that it has been enabled due to Chrome's "click-to-play" feature?

Background

Chrome's new "click-to-play" feature detects plugins that are not visibly significant and pauses them. Chrome displays a "play" button over the plugin, a user may click the "play" button to activate the plugin. (reference: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xPcpRBzyPcc)

Here's a screenshot of it in action (notice white play buttons):

You can see in this screen shot that it has paused a video-player (right column). That video player has HTML5-based controls overlaying a Flash-based video player. So, there's no way for a user to click the play-button as the entire SWF is purposefully covered by HTML5-based play/pause controls.

What I need is to detect when the SWF has been paused by the "click-to-play" feature so I can disable the controls and make the SWF interactive.

What I've tried

1. In JavaScript - All methods exposed via ExternalInterface are still available though the SWF is paused. It actually responds like it's playing and does not return an error.
2. In JavaScript - Update the size of the embedded <object> to > 700x400px. "Click-to-play" does not pause a SWF of this size. So, I tried using -webkit-transfor: scale(0.5) to use CSS to scale it back to desired size. Chrome calculates the final rendered size and pauses the SWF regardless.
3. In Flash - stage.frameRate returns correct value (it's not set to 0 to pause the SWF for instance)

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In writing up this question I found an answer, decided to post here anyways in case others need help with this issue.

Answer 1

For the benefit of others who are looking for the rules around Flash blocking stuff,please see them below:

• The Flash Content and the page are loaded from the same domain.
  Unknown Width and Height of the Flash Object ie when Chrome gets the width and height as 0 or less than 0.
• The Flash Content is whitelisted by the user in Chrome Settings.
• The Width and Height of the Flash Object are less than or equal to 5 each, considering the content to be Tiny and essential.
• The Width and Height of the Flash object are equal or greater than 398x298.
• The Aspect Ratio of the content is 16:9, (with an allowed deviation of 0.01) AND the width*height area is at least 120K.

At least one of the above criterias need to be met, in order to get the content marked as Essential and not get Auto-Paused. Although, I have seen few deviations and Chrome hasn't made any public announcement on the rules yet.