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Comment by nfriedly | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's still the case, but a while back Firefox would allow muted looping videos to auto play, basically like an animated gif. However, if the video had an audio track (even muted) it would keep the computer from sleeping.

Some of adafruits documentation pages had exactly this combination, so leaving a single page of documentation open would keep my computer from automatically sleeping.

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yeah I just tested this, autoplay only works on the video tag if muted which seems like it defeats the point.

It’s specifically to replace GIFs. If you don’t allow autoplay of muted videos people will just use GIFs which are way, way more bandwidth intensive.

It keeping your computer awake sounds like a bug though, it’s not intended behavior.

Please open a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp... if that's the case, and CC padenot@mozilla.com, I'll have a look next week.

Here's the bug I filed several years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1684718 - I just cc'd you

I interpreted the comments on that bug to mean that the Adafruit site has an unmuted video that happens to have a silent audio track, which isn’t strictly a muted autoplay issue. But maybe I’m wrong.

Yeah, I think there was some confusion about which video on the page was causing the issue, but the test cases I created are much simpler - just one video per page.

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