Unable to reproduce this issue on Windows-10 using chrome latest stable #62.0.3202.75 by following the steps mentioned below

1. Navigated to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy and enabled 'User gesture is required for cross origin iframes'
2. Clicked on the provided URL from step #2 from original comment
3. Refreshed the page using shortcut key ctrl+R
4. Observed the video auto plays as expected
 
mqudsi@ Could you please confirm is this issue is seen on incognito mode as well? Please recheck this issue on chrome latest stable #62.0.3202.75 by creating a new profile without any third party apps or extensions in your browser.

Thanks!

Did you restart the browser after setting the policy?

@brajkumar: I don't understand. You are confirming that the video IS playing automatically, but that is the *very* bug I am reporting!

@mlamouri: Yes, otherwise the video would have autoplayed the first time around.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "brajkumar@chromium.org" to the cc list and removing "Needs-Feedback" label.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

What's happening here is that when the user presses Ctrl+R, the page received user gesture, allowing autoplay. The refresh is seen as a same-origin navigation, therefore the page after the refresh is allowed to autoplay on load.

This is quite an interesting edge case as we can't differentiate regular keyboard inputs and Ctrl+R for the user activation and it's a quite surprising side-effect for the user. One simple solution would be to reset the document user gesture on refresh. It could surprise users in a few cases but might be less painful.

@mlamouri that's what I initially thought, but I don't think that's the bug. If instead of reloading the page you relaunch Chrome (for example, change a flag then choose "relaunch chrome now" or kill chrome and restore tabs) and have it configured such that the last-opened pages will be restored on relaunch, the video will also autoplay although no gesture was performed.

I did not try with relauching but I tried the following:
1. reload from browser UI;
2. reload with F5;
3. reload with Ctrl+R.

#2 and #3 both end up with the video playing. #1 does not.

I tried with relaunching after changing Chrome flags on 64.0.3253.3 and the video did not play on relaunch.

I started working on this. I think we will break "user activation" transmission when reloading. I think it would be a less bad experience to have to re-click play over having a website autoplay when reloading. Doing the right thing wouldn't be trivial so we have to go for the compromise in M65 :(

Should be fixed by:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f7246b9e21cd0065f3b5eb4699c90c61b8e8008c

Thank you very much, and I appreciate the effort put into identifying the "ideal" solution here.

I believe there may be another bug where ctrl+(tab, tab, tab) i.e. holding down control and pressing tab or shift+tab to navigate causes a video to autoplay if its tab is momentarily switched to. I haven't tested this thoroughly, though.