oEmbed enhancement proposal - add an optional "autoplay" attribute to video and audio oEmbed

[Kenley Cheung]

There are several oEmbed implementations out in the wild that support automatic playback of embedded content via their oEmbed APIs.

Unfortunately, the parameter to specify this is not currently codified in the oEmbed standard and varies between implementors.

I am proposing standardizing this parameter while making it optional to implement so that there is some consistency for clients.

Examples:

SoundCloud: https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/oembed#introduction (parameter - auto_play)

Vimeo: http://developer.vimeo.com/apis/oembed (parameter - autoplay)

Use cases:

I'm an developer working on the open-source Concerto Digital Signage (http://concerto-signage.org) project, which is an open-source web-based electronic message board using client machines with web browsers.

I brought up the idea of using oEmbed here: https://github.com/concerto/concerto-audio/issues/2

Concerto users can submit content like URLs to oEmbed resources and have them displayed in a rotation on-screen.

Implementing the changes in this proposal would massively benefit Concerto users.

I'm looking to start a discussion about this and I would like to seek feedback on this idea!

- Kenley

[Ivan Paramonau]

“Autoplay” is certainly useful. JavaScript API for the playback sync is even more useful though (start, pause, stop, etc). 

The challenge with detailing of the original oEmbed spec is that, even if providers start supporting the changes, there won’t be easy way for consumers to auto-discover (and rely on) it. One could use “version” or other field for such purposes. However, fields are only be available after oEmbed API call is already done. 

Here’s the alternative directions:

* Embedly guys started the project to unify such API in player.js project for their media iframes. Check it out on GitHub. 

* Iframely will reference this JS API into our own responsive embeds spec as “playback” tag for rel attributes. This way consumers can detect it. 

If you do need the auto-play videos, you’d be better off consuming Open Graph. My experience after testing over 2000 domains, is that over 90% of OG videos auto play. Compared to just 2-3 default oEmbed cases that we saw auto play. Domains DB is here.

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