Damn it Arianna this is annoying!

July 18, 2012 8:51 PM

When did Huffington Post started auto-playing it's embedded videos and how do I make it stop?
posted by Bonzai to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Could you use a Flashblock extension in your browser?
posted by rumbles at 9:29 PM on July 18, 2012

I swear by the Flashblock Firefox extension. Stops all auto-play videos, and just one click to play them.
posted by no regrets, coyote at 10:57 PM on July 18, 2012

If you use Chrome you can require a click to run Flash (Which is what Flashblock does) by doing the following. Go to : Wrench -> Settings -> Show Advanced Settings -> Content Settings. On the window that pops up scroll down to Plug-Ins and either check "Click To Play" or if you only want click to play on Huffington Post and not everywhere click "Manage exceptions" then add "[*]huffingtonpost.com" (without the quotes) and set it to "ask".
posted by Ookseer at 11:26 PM on July 18, 2012 [4 favorites]

Christ, and they do this to other people's videos too.

A while back, they hotlinked one of our videos on their homepage, and modified our embed code to make the video automatically start playing.

In terms of ethics, that's a pretty big no-no.
posted by schmod at 7:23 AM on July 19, 2012

Thanks Ookseer! Works perfect.
posted by Bonzai at 7:58 AM on July 19, 2012

Wow, thanks Ookseer. I kept reading about this 'clicktoplay' thing in Chrome couldn't ever find it in the settings - I ended up using an adblocking extension. Silly UI mystery solved. And thanks Bonzai for asking.
posted by Salamandrous at 9:03 AM on July 19, 2012