New Browser Policies

Starting with Safari 11 and soon to be followed by Chrome in January 2018, any videos that have audio enabled will be stopped from autoplaying. 

SectionsPro Background Video

The clue here is in the name - Sections videos are designed to be background videos to augment your content in front.

Muted by default

Sections videos are muted by default and will therefore autoplay without problems in all the new browsers. Further more, if you enable the Play on Touch Devices feature, your videos will be muted automatically, regardless of the state of the mute button in the settings. 

These Videos will autoplay as normal.

Videos With Un-muted Audio

Occasionally, users enable audio on their SectionsPro videos for various reasons.  With the new browser updates, this will prevent autoplay. 

SectionsPro from version 3.0.3 onwards will therefore detect this situation and present the user with a Play Button. 

The play button will display only once and when clicked, the video will start and resume normal functionality. This means that it will still pause and automatically restart when the browser loses or gains focus. In addition, all the usual in-view options will continue to work.

There are 3 shapes to choose from and all the colors can be customized.

Don't forget that you can also provide your own play, pause and mute buttons using the custom class option in the Sections BG Video stack. For this reason, there is an option to Never Show Play Button. Obviously this should be used with caution and never enabled for un-muted videos unless you have provided an alternative play button yourself using ButtonPlus2 or other stacks.

The Third Way

This being SectionsPro, there is of course another way of doing things. You may prefer to have the video autoplay muted but offer the user a prompt to un-mute it.

By using the Mute Toggle input in the background video settings, you can link the video mute control to an external button or other stack that accepts a custom class. In addition, by checking the Hide When Un-muted  this can then be hidden once the user has done a one-time un-mute. The video will then play and pause as normal using the in-view controls or when the browser gets and loses focus.

Instruction Video

All the above is explained further in this video along with how to set up ButtonPlus2 in Joey mode to make toggle play/pause and mute buttons.