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Maybe I'm unlucky but in my experience the reddit video player is terrible and maybe 25% of the of the time just gives me a black box or the first frame and won't play.

It also has the caveat that if you want to share it with someone you have to send them a link to the reddit comment thread, which is not always desired or appropriate.

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BTW I've had the same problem, the solution is to just click it twice (once to "pause" it and once to unpause it). For what it's worth I've only gotten this problem since chrome released their update that disables autoplay (https://blog.chromium.org/2018/03/chrome-66-beta-css-typed-o...).

I think the black box just means that the first frame is black

Most of the times I've had it are on iOS, and no amount of tapping or putting it in full screen mode where you can use the native video controls will make it load.

I wonder if they're trying to serve WebM or some other unsupported codec to iOS devices by accident, but I'd think that would have some kind of error indication instead of a black box.

I recently discovered that youtube-dl works on v.redd.it links, so you can download and share the vids directly.

But I'm with you 100%, their video and image hosting is super slow, and needs to be paused/unpaused a few times before loading or playing anything.

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