HTML5 Video: How to enable *non-muted* autoplay in Chrome for Android

Question

I am working on a simple solution for a local museum that wants visitors to interact with informative videos installed on tablets. The videos are simply embedded on simple HTML5 pages and are supposed to autoplay upon page load.

However, in their infinite wisdom, Google has apparently decided not to enable autoplay on Chrome for Android if the video is not muted. Their reasoning is apparently that it is resource/bandwith costly and "users" (who?) did not like it.

In other words: It will work on Chrome desktop versions and such, but when you have not added the keyword "muted" to the tag, it will not autoplay on an Android device.

So this works:

 <video id="player" class="player" controls autoplay muted>

But not this:

 <video id="player" class="player" controls autoplay>

The reason I am stuck with Chrome, is because I want to run the webpages as an app/shortcut on the homescreen, so as to get rid of the Chrome interface bar with all the tabs and stuff.

So the question is whether there is a setting on the tablet or some other trick to enable non-muted autoplay, so I can get this to work. Or is it possible to let Firefox be used for urls placed on the homescreen (or some other way to get rid of the top interface bar).

Answer 1

If you want to do it for a device you control then you can (though obviously it's not something you can easily get users to do for their devices as it applies browser wide, not site specific).

Navigate to chrome://flags and set gesture requirement for media playback (about three or four pages down the list) to disabled