reset chrome media engagement score

Question

I know that Chrome 66 introduced some restrictions when autoplaying a video (in HTML5). In some cases the autoplay is supported. One of the conditions to support autoplay is when the user has watched a video in the domain before or something similar. So Chrome is keeping an internal score for each site. This score can be checked in chrome://media-engagement.

But now my problem is that for testing I have not figured it out a simple way to reset this score. So I can not properly test it for the new users.

Any idea?

Answer 1

You can also clean MEI by clearing browsing history:

• Click Ctrl+Shift+Del or navigate to chrome://settings/clearBrowserData
• Go to Advanced > All time
• tick Browsing history
• Click Clear data
• Navigate to chrome://media-engagement to verify

BTW. Note that notably going into incognito mode doesn't reset MEI; the MEI data are copied from regular session when opening first incognito tab (and then lives on its own until incognito session is closed).

Answer 2

The easiest way I found to test using a clean score is to create a new profile in Chrome:

1- At the top right of Chrome, click the button with your name or People People.

2- Click Manage people.

3- Click Add person.

4- Click Save. A new window will open and ask you to sign in.

Answer 3

It is not recommended to manually make changes to your profile folder, but this worked for me.

1. Go to chrome://version/ and note the Profile Path
2. Close Chrome
3. Open the Preferences file in your profile folder with a text editor.
4. Delete the media_engagement entry.
5. Go to chrome://media-engagement to verify that everything has been cleared.

Alternatively you can just remove the Preferences file altogether but this removes a bunch of other things as well.