Video hosting and autoplay

Digital Media, vquence

This week, we’ve been working hard towards getting the corporate website for my new company Vquence up. As part of that, we shot videos of most of our key people in an attempt to “eat our own dogfood”: show off our slicecasting technology, which comes as embeddable vquences (video sequences). The idea is to extract slices from a set of videos, collate them together like highlights, and make them clickable – so people can click through to the full length videos.

On our website, we decided to show the vquence with a clickthrough to full-length videos hosted at different video hosting sites, including not just the popular YouTube and Google video sites, but also sites such as Metacafe, Guba, iFilm, blip.tv, Grouper, Gofish, VSocial or DailyMotion.

On click-through, we wanted to have the embedded videos from those hosting sites to start playback directly without enforcing people to make another click on the image. This has turned out as quite a challenge.

Not every video hosting site that supports embedding also supports autoplay. Here’s what I found.

The following sites provide an autoplay parameter for their embed tags (only key components shown in the code):

  • youtube:
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxx&autoplay=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
  • google video:
    <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-xxxxxxx&hl=en-AU" FlashVars="autoPlay=true&playerMode=embedded"/>
  • metacafe:
    <embed src="http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/xxxx/title_yyy.swf?playerVars=autoPlay=yes" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>
  • blip.tv:
    <embed src="http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/blipplayer.swf?autoStart=true &file=http://blip.tv/file/get/xxxxxx.flv%3Fsource%3D3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
  • DailyMotion:
    <embed src="http://www.dailymotion.com/flash/flvplayer.swf?xxxxxx" flashvars="url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymotion.com%2Fget%2F14%2F320x240 %2Fflv%2Fxxxx.flv%3Fkey%3Dxxxxxx.flv&duration=68&autoStart=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>
  • Grouper:
    <embed src="http://grouper.com/mtg/mtgPlayer.swf?v=1.7" FlashVars="ap=1&mu=0&rf=-1&vfver=8&extid=-1&extsite=-1&ml=xxxxxx" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>
  • GoFish:
    <embed src="http://www.gofish.com/player/fwplayer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" FlashVars="&loc=blog&gf=true&ns=false&fs=false&gfid=xxxxxx&c=grey
    &autoPlay=true&getAd=false&wm=false&ct=true&tb=false&svr=www.gofish.com:80">
  • VSocial:
    <embed src="http://static.vsocial.com/flash/ups.swf?d=yyyy&a=1&s=xxxxxx"/> – be warned though that their player takes a third for menu stuff

I know that both Guba and iFilm have an autoplay feature since the video on their websites plays without the need for an additional activation, but I couldn’t find out what parameters were needed or which other flash player I would need to use.

Revver simply refuses to support this feature reasoning that nobody would want a video to play back automatically without the need for an interaction. Guys – come on! Nowadays videos live on their own Web page. A person that is navigating to that Webpage and knows what they are navigating to shouldn’t really have to jump an additional hurdle just to get your videos to play!

BTW: I was unable to manage to upload a video to Metacafe from my Mac inside Firefox, although I tried for 3 days. 🙁
 – worked now!

I do not claim to have tested all the video hosting sites out there. But these are a good selection and my current state of experience.

Ah yes: go and enjoy our new site – http://www.vquence.com/ – and don’t forget to check out the videos at the bottom of the front page.

24 thoughts on “Video hosting and autoplay”

  2. And yet another one:

    Sharkle:

    < embed src="http://sharkle.com/splayer.swf?id=XXX&next=&buffer=3&auto=1&dir=" quality="high" scale="noscale" salign="lt" bgcolor="#e6e6e6" width="100%" height="100%" name="vid_embed" swLiveConnect=true align="middle" id="vid_embed" />

  3. Ebaumsworld:

    <embed flashvars=”file=http://www.ebaumsworld.com/xxxx.flv&autostart=true” src=”http://emuse.ebaumsworld.com/mediaplayer.swf”/>

  5. can you autoplay this

    <embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://www.shopit.com/video/player.swf” bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” quality=”high” flashvars=”User=http://www.shopit.com/SmartPlat&File=47596b472a6cb.flv&counter=http://www.shopit.com/video_counter.php?args=147,22375&WPath=http://www.shopit.com/videos/&Duration=0:20&ID=147&path=http://www.shopit.com” height=”300″ width=”320″

  6. gr8inferno: I haven’t played with shopit. You would need to find a video on their site that already autoplays and then pick up the flashvar that causes it. Then you add this autoplay variable to the embed tag and you should be set.

  11. Thank-you so much for providing that code!

    My only question now is where should it go – I tried a couple of places that didn’t work such as adding
    and adding autostart=”true” to the embed code, but I couldn’t get it to work. Here is a sample embed code from funnyordie.com:

    Thank-you again!
    Julia

    1. Just chuck a “?autoplay=true” behind the video url both in the “object” and in the “embed” section. 🙂

      <object width="640" height="360">&tl;param name="movie" value="http://www.joost.com/embed/08200eh?autoplay=true"></param>.... < embed src="http://www.joost.com/embed/08200eh?autoplay=true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allo
      wscriptaccess="always" allownetworking="all" width="640" height="360"> ... </object>

  13. Hi again –

    still trying to get a funnyordie video to autostart – have any of you actually gotten the autostart=true parameter as suggested earlier to work, because I have tried placing it in multiple spots without success. I have had no problem embedding videos from other sites onto my website and getting them to autoplay.

    Thanks – Julia

  14. Hmm I checked it out again and it seems that you also need to add “&internal=true” to make it work. That in turn makes advertising appear, but if you are willing to accept that, you can do that.

    So, you have to use the following flashvar:

    flashvars=”key=6334c66241&autostart=true&internal=true”

  15. That does work – thank-you!!!

    And it does add a huge ad that takes up half the screen, so it might not be worth it, although the ad does go away in full screen mode.

    Thanks again,

    Julia

  17. Having troubles with the BlipTV code. Maybe they’ve updated their embed code? I can’t add the AutoStart parameter to it anywhere… any ideas?

    Here’s the code I’m working on:

    <a href=”http://blip.tv/file/get/RawAndFit-SleepingInATrainStation488.flv” rel=”nofollow”></a>
    <a href=”http://blip.tv/file/get/RawAndFit-SleepingInATrainStation488.flv” rel=”nofollow”>Click to play</a>
    play_blip_movie_2895602();

    Thanks for the help!

    1. @Casey

      You have to use an embed tag and possibly a object tag around that. This worked for me in Firefox and autoplayed:

      <embed src=”http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/blipplayer.swf?autoStart=true &file=http://blip.tv/file/get/RawAndFit-SleepingInATrainStation488.flv%3Fsource%3D3″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />

  18. This is my video code. I can’t get it to auto play.

    can you add whatever it needs? I read up above and i dont get it. Or, im doing something wrong.

    <a href=”http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbf15f_ckg-charles-gillette-la-music-award_music” rel=”nofollow”>CKG * Charles Gillette * LA Music Awards 2009 * RealTVfilms</a>

  19. @CKG Dailymotion have slightly changed their embed code and all the variables now seem to be part of the “movie” field. So, here is what you need to do:

    <object width=”480″ height=”275″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/xbf15f&related=0&autoStart=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/xbf15f&related=0&autoStart=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”480″ height=”275″ allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always”></embed></object>

  20. i have a small issue regarding autoplaying and maximising the videos using object tag in firefox.the same code is working fine in ie.
    the code is as follows:

    <object id="fredv2" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/swflash.cab&quot;
    height="450px" standby="Please wait while loading…." width="100%" data="”>

    <param runat="server" name="movie" value="” />

    <embed align="middle" allowscriptaccess="true" wmode="transparent" quality="high" controller="true" scale="noscale"
    bgcolor="#869ca7" height="450px" autoplay="1" autostart="true" loop="false" name="fredv2" swliveconnect="true"
    play="true" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer&quot; src="” salign=”lt”
    allownetworking=”all” flashvars=”autoPlay=true&playerMode=embedded” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”100%”>

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