Stream playback in browser is automatically muted

[Briggs599]

Hi,

I've noticed when creating a web app and embedding the player, I can't get the stream to auto-play audio out loud (video auto-plays fine), it always starts muted.

Any suggestions?

[j12y]

This is a limitation with how popular web browsers behave when there is media with sound on a web page. You will observe different behavior depending on the web browser autoplay policy being used by the end-user and in particular when a user is on a mobile platform.

Recommendations

When using the streaming hosted player on a web page (ie. Getting Started by Embedding the Streaming Viewer in an iFrame) you should:

• set autoPlay to true
• set muted to false

This is typically done with query strings at the end of the src viewer URL such as:

<iframe src="https://viewer.millicast.com?streamId=abc123/mystreamName&autoPlay=true&muted=false" allowfullscreen width="640" height="480">
</iframe>

This will not guarantee that the stream will begin with audio for all users, but for any user with their autoplay settings to allow audio either globally or for your application domain then it would work as expected.

Browser Policies

• For Firefox and Safari, autoplay with sound is only allowed after the user interacts with the domain in some way such as clicking the video, touching, tapping, etc. (Firefox Autoplay Settings, Safari Autoplay Settings) or if explicitly enabled and allowed.

• For Chrome and Edge, if the end-user typically interacts with video, the Media Engagement Index may allow audio to autoplay if the user frequently unmutes videos (Chrome Autoplay Settings, Edge Autoplay Settings).

See the Mozilla Autoplay guide for media and Web Audio APIs for a definitive source on interactions of autoplay with a variety of Web Media APIs.