Greasy Fork

Auto-play for HTML5 can be delayed when coming from search results

This occurs with both Firefox 44 and Pale Moon 26, but does not seem to occur when using the VLC plugin (which I do not prefer due to lack of keyboard controls); Guerrilla Scripting vs GreaseMonkey 3.6 also seems to make no difference.


Steps to re-create the issue:

0. Make sure both HTML5 and AutoPlay are enabled in ViewTube_GM; I tested with LD WebM (though it may also occur with HD MP4; if it does that would be easier to test for people with faster internet connections)

1. Do a search on YouTube, such as the following:
www.youtube.com/results?search_query=far+lands+or+bust

2. From the listed results, left-click on any video so as to open it in the current tab.

3. The video should automatically start playing after about 1 or 2 seconds.

4. Click the back button in your browser to go back to the search results

5. Left-click on a different video, again making sure that it's opened in the same tab

6. Once the page loads, the video won't automatically play until around 30 seconds of the video has been buffered (which can take quite some time on my 3Mbps internet); by comparison the video in step 3 started playing near instantly.


If what is described in step 6 did not happen (and instead step 3 occurred), repeat steps 4 and 5 until you get the result described in step 6. Once it does occur, if you keep repeating steps 4 and 5 you should keep getting the result described in step 6.

I'm not able to reproduce the issue here (mp4 video in SD). The only thing I can see is, that some videos play for about 10s with a still picture and no sound before you actually see anything. I think this is due to the video itself.
And for the buffering issue you have - this is most probably browser related - nothing I can do about within the script. You may try selecting a different encoding or lower video quality to increase speed.

Well one thing is that having a fast internet connection may greatly mitigate the issue, and I have not yet tested whether it occurs with SD MP4 and HD MP4 - in the near future I will be sure to confirm whether internet connection speed, MP4 formats, and video bitrate make a difference with regards to the occurrence of this issue.

Also I would be surprised if it's browser related because it occurs with fresh copies of both Pale Moon 26 and Firefox 44.

Playback and buffering for HTML5 video is completely done by the browser itself, the script is just embedding the link in the correct format into the web page. As you wrote you do not have the issue with vlc (playback is obviously not done by the browser but by vlc in this case). Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox. So what is surprising you? As i wrote it is not the script playing back the video, the script has nothing to do with buffering. All this is done by the plugin resp. the browser.

The reason I find it surprising is because Sebaro's ViewTube does not do this (though it has a similar symptom with HD WebM and other HD DASH-only formats).

Also, if I right-click on the video and then click on "View video" so that it directly opens the video file by itself, the video will start playing almost right away even when it has to re-buffer everything.

Lastly, from some preliminary testing, it does seem like the internet connection makes a difference (that is, it is more obvious with a slow connection while a fast connection will mask the issue). Also it does occur with MP4 formats as well.