Can't Start a vídeo

Seems like the video not autoplaying problem came back again today. It’s a little different this time “the play button turns into a replay button too”

Hmm there was no further update today… Is this issue affecting all YT videos? With “play button” you are referring to the one in the black control bar, right?

Yes, also weirdly getting youtube ads now :frowning:

Does it affect every YouTube video?

sorry i completely ignored that question. not every video, sometimes. also it seems to be different per person. I.e. some videos will play for people and some will not play for others

we cleared cookies and cache and that seemed to help a little bit so far

Are you guys watching live streams from YouTube?

no we are not watching live streams

Hmm… it’s a bit tricky for me since i was no able to reproduce this so far with any browser i tested. When the video is not playing do you see only a black box or do you see a thumbnail of the video and it just won’t start?

Thumbnail of the video and it just won’t start

So this thread is kind of long so it might be worth me reiterating where we’re at.

I’ve had a room with some friends for a while now, it’s been working great. I am the only one with a an official w2g account, my friends just consistently log in on their personal devices. I am the server host (I created the room, I have ‘the crown’). I am running Windows and the latest Chrome and I have never gotten any errors on this computer.

My friends, (which also includes a second computer of mine, that I use to see if I can create the same problem as them), about a week ago started having problems where the video will not play automatically as we go through our playlist. Weirdly, it doesn’t happen on the same video for each person, or on each time. (i.e. video “abc” might break for person 1, but it won’t break for person 2. And video “abc” might break for person 1 but the next time we stumble upon “abc” it doesn’t break for person 1)

The error itself is just a screen with no video playing and a thumbnail of the video that should be playing. They can click “play” and that starts the video fine, but this is inconvenient as we have it up on the side as we are doing other things. My friends (and my second client) are using a variety of OS but all uo-to-date Chrome (Windows, OSX)

Okay, thanks that was useful. Modern browsers use a quite complex system to determine whether it’s allowed for a site to programmatically autoplay a video (including sound). This includes a score calculated on how many times you have played videos on a site and whether the site is in the background tab or not. You can view the score by putting “chrome://media-engagement” into the URL bar. Two things can help here:

  • Use Watch2Gether in a separate window with not other tabs. The window itself can be put in the background.

  • Click on the “Lock” icon next to the URL bar and set “Sound” to “Allow”

Let me know if that helps!

Latest patch seems to have fixed it…

Thanks for that feedback!