AFAIK, this is intended behavior when multiple tabs are playing audio/video. Safari has the same behavior.

This is a feature request for the new autoplay policy, re-opening

john, do you know who is the owner of this feature? I want to move it out of untriaged bucket.

pbos@, Chrome doesn't play videos on tabs that are loaded on a background page (and not yet visible). That is the reason why opening multiple tabs in background tabs doesn't autoplay. I would expect the same behaviour to kick in here.

Did you experience this on a build without specific flags on?
Can you reproduce it consistently?
What's the platform on which you experienced the bug?
Which Chrome version?

They don't start autoplaying straight away, but they sit there as "audio landmines" as they start autoplaying as soon as I switch to them even if that's minutes after I opened the tab.

Google Chrome	66.0.3355.0 (Official Build) dev (64-bit) (cohort: Dev)
OS Win10

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding the requester to the cc list.

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

.. also if I just press ctrl+tab to go through my tabs (say get to a tab after these) they all start playing at the same time, which is the cacophony thing I was referring to.

Steps:

1. Search YouTube for "hello"
2. Open the top three videos for later viewing.
3. Open another tab, do some other work or whatever, forget about YouTube.
4. Press ctrl+tab to go through your tabs. All YouTube autoplay videos start playing.

Maybe switching to a tab shouldn't be triggering autoplay, or maybe there shouldn't be N concurrent autoplays. I think even without (3) above we do the wrong thing as the user did not intend to have all tabs start playing at the same time by just tabbing through them.

I agree with this but the only way to solve this is to disable autoplay entirely. If YouTube wasn't allowed to autoplay (with low MEI for example), this wouldn't be a problem. We had plans to avoid multiple source of playbacks in Chrome but they have been shelved.

Could you consider disabling autoplay for tabs that were opened as background tabs but have been inactive for say 2 minutes? That would solve the problem of the user forgetting that these tabs are about videos that haven't started playing yet.

The issue seems to be a feature request. Hence, marking it as untriaged for further inputs from dev team.

Thanks...!!

I agree that we should disable autoplay after some period of time where the user hasn't accessed the tab and it's just been in the background. Assigning to me to wrap into larger PRD for future work.

 Issue 804602  has been merged into this issue.

This bug has an owner, thus, it's been triaged. Changing status to "assigned".

=>denizz@ who is the new media ux pm.

Updating owner to be John Pallett as the autoplay owner atm.