If you’re as sick of auto-play videos in Facebook as I am, you might appreciate a little tutorial I created (guess what tool I used?) to show you how to shut the darn things off. It’s not too hard to find in the web-version of Facebook but oddly the fix is only available in Chrome, not Safari. Once you fix it using Chrome, it shuts them off in Safari. On iOS it’s hidden in a completely different place, maybe because Facebook uses Webkit as does Safari so it’s the same problem. In any case, here’s a link to my tutorial. You can thank me later!
podfeet.com/blog/tutorials-5/how-to-disable-auto-play-videos-in-facebook/
The auto-play is somewhat less annoying if you use the Facebook iOS app. With the iOS app, the videos do start playing as you scroll past them in the timeline, but they do so without audio. You only get the audio when you actually tap on a video to watch it. I actually don’t mind auto-play if it’s done this way; sometimes it’s hard to tell from a freeze-frame (which you normally get when seeing a video) what the video is about, so it’s hard to decide whether or not I might be interested in watching it. With the FB auto-play I can silently see the first few seconds of the video as I scroll by, which is usually enough for me to decide whether it’s an interesting video or just crap. I wonder if they can duplicate this behavior with the web version of Facebook. I guess it depends on what video playback technology they are using (Flash or HTML5 or whatever.)
Good points, Donald. I have gotten sucked into a few that way and thank GOODNESS they don’t auto-play audio, but I’ve run out of data because of these darn things before when I’m on travel so having the OPTION to turn them off is a very good thing.