disabling autostart

[crose]

Is it possible to disable autostart for a player that is being assigned content via its URL? (in other words, passing a value for the bctid parameter).

It seems that unchecking "Automatically play video on page load" in the Publishing module doesn't have the desired effect.

[BC-Bob]

At the moment there is not an option to disable this auto-start functionality if you pass in a bctid parameter to the page that hosts the player. I can provide some context for this product decision. A while back (2006?) we had decoded that if someone clicked on a link to watch a video it would be nice if the video would automatically start. i.e. If the intention of the click was to watch a video, why not start the video and not require another click. So to that end the bctid query param was typically associated with URLs shared to watch videos. 

I don't know if this is feasible, it might try some experimentation, is to strip off the bctid param in some form and pass that value along in your own parameter. Then you could use the player API to load the video via the supplied video id.

Could you provide more context for your use case? Perhaps we should consider some enhancement to the JS code params...

Bob Mason

CTO 

[crose]

Thanks for the response.

In this particular case, we've built a module that clicks through to a page containing a video player, and there was a request (though not critical) to disable autostart.

I was surprised to find there wasn't a simple, non JS solution, e.g. appending an additional param to the query string, such as autostart=false, considering the wealth of customization options already available.

[BC-Bob]

Adding an extra, optional query param seems like a reasonable idea. I'll bring it to the dev team and we'll discuss. 

Thank you for the suggestion!

Bob Mason

CTO 

[BC-Todd]

The reason that this is not currently configurable is that the use of bctid (and bclid) were intended for our auto-generated URLs, not as APIs for the players to be used by publishers. The snippet configuraton options or the runtime APIs were intended for that purpose.

I agree with Bob that one additional parameter seems feasible, but my fear is always that one param will turn into two into three into four and suddenly we are dealing with countless permutations. We already deal with that using the snippet config interface and didn't want to create another set of permutations to deal with (e.g., the URL has autoStart=true, but the snippet has autoStart=false, so one obviously has to win over the other which then leasds to more support questions, etc.).

Can you help me understand better what you mean by "a module that clicks through to a page containing a video player". Why does the URL need to contain bctid? Is there video assigned in the snippet? Is the click action for a specific video that overrides the one in the snippet? If that is the case, why not play the video? Thanks for any further info so I can fully understand the situation.

[crose]

Thanks for the feedback.

The module in question utilizes the media API to output custom URLs with bctid parameters appended.  The request to disable auto-start became a problem when I realized it conflicted with the "force playback" nature of the bctid param.

I've modified the module to output a custom param, and I'm simply using the player API to listen for an asynchronous video retrieval/load event, stop playback of the video once the stream starts, and then display the overlay menu.

Here's a snippet:

...

function onContentLoad(evt) {
    modContent.getVideoAsynch(vid)

}

function onVideoLoad(evt) {
    modVP.loadVideo(evt.video.id);
}

function onStreamStart(evt) {   
    modVP.stop();

    modMenu.setOverlayMenuVisible(true);

}

...

Thanks again.

[BC-Todd]

You could compress all of that into a single call of cueVideo(). That will retrieve the video metadata and load into the player without playing it back.

Alternatively you might consider writing the player dynamically to the page so that you can set its @videoPlayer parameter so that it automatically cues up that video on load.

[crose · Accepted solution]

Of course!  ...cueVideo().  How did I miss that?  Thanks Todd.

As for your alternative suggestion, the page contains a multiplaylist player that is also being used to serve up single videos (linked from the aforementioned custom module), and adding the @videoPlayer parameter doesn't seem to work