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firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false

additionally the dom.audiochannel.mutedByDefault and media.default_volume settings may also be useful if you want slightly different behavior.

If you want a more blunt tool you can also use content blockers to block media content until you opt into it for a particular site.

> I know there are plugins than can somewhat do this, but no solutions are universal or great.

How so? There are about a dozen FF addons covering different use-cases like muting inactive tabs or all tabs but a designated one. If none of them meet your particular expectations that might also indicate that everyone wants something different and it is difficult for browser vendors to cover all expectations. Maybe you should modify an existing addon instead to do what you want.

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breaks vimeo and twiter vids. need firefox addon with button to toggle the setting.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autoplay-togg...

>firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false

That doesn't always work. Some videos don't play at all (even when clicked) and some others play automatically anyway (rare, but it happens).

The good thing about setting browser defaults is that people producing these offending sites eventually give up and change their behavior.

I'm taking a more drastic way; turning media.{mp4, webm, ...}.enabled into False never let YouTube and other media autoplay(even play nomally) without any addons. When I want to watch videos, download them by youtube-dl and watch locally.

Why would you want that?

One good reason for me personally is to insure future availability. As I type this, there are a couple of videos in my watch-later playlist that have been replaced with "video removed".

My Watch Later is like 100 videos long. Ain't nobody got time for that.

You're posting on HN, I would think you would find a way to automate it. ;-)

I believe youtube-dl is capable of downloading entire lists, but I don't know if the watch-later list behaves as a normal list. One way to find out.

youtube-dl can download lists of videos.

It also automatically doesn't download things you already have, so it can be used periodically to sync the list if you want.

It only really matters if you expect videos to go down, but I also have my small collection of "videos that were obviously going to be taken down".

This is one of the best features (apart from channel backups).

I think because of its name people also don't realize that youtube-dl works for LOTS of other sites and it's relatively easy to add new sites in as well.

You download YT videos before watching them? Seriously? Sometimes the suggestions on HN are literally insane in the amount of effort people go through to avoid things that wouldn't be a problem in the first place if you did something simple like use adblock software.

I saw some other post where a guy hand edits tens of thousands of entries in his hosts file... yeah dude what an amazing use of time.

Link to the guy who does this?

It might be this one from another comment

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

I've used to employ a similar work flow to GP until a few years ago when video support finally got acceptable in web browsers. I still download talks rather than watch them on youtube or if I want to insure the future availability of the video.

If the current web works well for you then great, but it would be naive to think that it fits everyone's use case (Even more so to label what they need to do as "insane").

the change to the hosts file is actually a really good idea. it is reliable and doesn't trip up ad blocking detectors. perhaps its greatest benefit is that it's a change that only has to happen once and everyone else who also wants to can benefit from it [0]. so your assertion is valid, even though it was sarcastic, that it is an amazing use of one's time.

[0] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Watching later with youtube-dl is actually the recommended way to do YouTube on OpenBSD; various "OpenBSD as a desktop OS" tutorials mention it, and in practice it works very well. On that particular OS it is due to the lack of a native Flash plugin, but even with YouTube offering most of their videos via HTML5 it actually makes for a better experience to download and then view them. I'd imagine it could even be automated trivially, by calling youtube-dl via a browser plugin, or by writing a script to pass YouTube URLs to with a simple GUI thrown together in FLTK or TCL/TK.

As for the hosts file, a hand-edited file works great, and you don't have to do thousands of entries on your own. You can find some great examples all over the web, then tune them to your own needs, saving a lot of time. For example, there are at least two out there for Windows 10 users to block all communication with Microsoft's servers, avoiding any telemetry and tracking by the OS. If your router is smart enough, you can even upload your hosts file to it to block any device on your network from getting ads and being tracked.

> actually makes for a better experience to download and then view them.

Can you specify how? I was doing this when I didn't have enough RAM for the Youtube player with latest Firefox and it's not what I personally felt. The current player has size options (larger or full-screen), annotations and comments can be disabled (e.g. with Adblock lists). In the end it's always having the video canvas in front of your eyes. Maybe integration with a tiling WM?

> I'd imagine it could even be automated trivially, by calling youtube-dl via a browser plugin, or by writing a script to pass YouTube URLs to with a simple GUI thrown together in FLTK or TCL/TK.

Existing means for VLC integration aren't that bad either.

> Can you specify how?

For me it was because Firefox on OpenBSD, even on a modern, fast system (quad core AMD64 with 8GB RAM), is so slow and stuttery with any streaming video it was too painful. Using youtube-dl and playing it via mplayer worked much better, and you can customize mplayer's controls to mimic YouTube's if you like (though I never bothered).

VLC is another great option, it's designed for streaming so yes that would be a great alternative. I personally don't use VLC on non-Windows OSes except on Haiku.

there are browser addons that directly pass the current site's URL to mpv, which in turn uses youtube-dl to fetch the contents. so it's pretty much 1-click playback.

> You download YT videos before watching them? Seriously?

I do this because the YouTube website (when the player is present) is too slow for my device. It adds about 5 seconds, nothing terrible.

I use butterflies to watch videos http://xkcd.com/378/

    #!/bin/bash
    url=`xsel`
    notify-send "Downloading - $url"
    youtube-dl -o - "$url" -f 43 | mplayer -

Whatever is in your default xsel buffer gets streamed to mplayer, if you bind it a keyboard shortcut (I use alt+shift+y (for Youtube)).

Makes life a lot more convenient :)

Did that buy youtube is still on autoplay.

https://gist.github.com/ivan/4a5c10930629f1c7b2a05857268c4c2... if you want a userscript

I just tried it on nightly and it worksforme(tm).

Y'know, youtube is one of the few sites where people actually want autoplay to work.

Yeah, if I know I'm going to a YT link I'm prepared for it. Unfortunately with the rise of URL shorteners I often don't know I'm going to a video site so I'm still undecided about whether I want the video to autoplay or not.

When you visit a video explicitly, yes. But when you jump into a specific channel you don't want a default video auto-playing all the time, which is pretty annoying.

Blame Youtube for that horrible feature, not the browser.

Nobody claimed it was anyone else's fault, that's already well established. The entire premise of this thread is to discuss OP's plea for browsers to actually fix the problem.

I never want youtube to Autoplay.

Not me for sure. Autoplay-after-autoplay makes it even more hilarious

>> youtube is one of the few sites where people actually want autoplay

Not me. I usually open a few tabs at the same time and have to stop every video manually. That's pretty annoying. I wish it didn't have autoplay.

YouTube doesn't start playing a video until you focus the tab.

That's not true for all browsers.

As @ben_bai pointed out above it works that way on Chromium.

Chromium is the Browser you want. You can load a bunch of tabs an it only starts autoplay when you finally switch to the tab you want to watch.

Best viewed with IE (tm), revisited.

The YouTube Plus add-on has an option to turn off YT autoplay, as well as a number of other quality-of-life things.

> firefox -> about:config -> media.autoplay.enabled = false

Unfortunately, this isn't available for devices with a monopolized browser. (iOS)

So make another Ask HN post: "Dear Google, Apple, Mozilla, and MS: Please End Monopolized Browsers for our devices"

That wouldn't contribute anything to the conversation.

It would be more like "Dear Apple: Please End Monopolized Browsers for our devices"

Google's and MS's operating systems don't monopolize the browser. I'm not sure if Mozilla is even making an OS anymore. The only OS in this day and age which doesn't let you implement your own browser engine is iOS.

I can't tell you how many iOS users are tricked by "Oh, I can get Chrome and Firefox on iOS" that don't realize it's just skinned webkit. Totally dishonest.

I'm actually impressed that Chrome on iOS manages to be less stable than Safari since it's using the same engine...

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