no autoplay in iframe HTML5 player on mobile (Android Chrome and Firefox)?

Question

I've recently run into an issue when embedding a video with standard iframe embed code and adding autoplay=1 like this:

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Le4kjAIcj4k?rel=0&amp;autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The results when testing:

• autoplay works both on desktop and mobile if the Flash-version of the player is loaded (if Flash is present & no HTML5-beta participation cookie is present)
• it works in the HTML5-version on the Desktop as well
• but does not autoplay in the HTML5 mobile version (tested on Android 4.1.2 with both Firefox Mobile and Chrome on this page, on Android you need to make sure you don't have flash).

Is this a known issue? Any workaround?

Answer 1

When you use the <iframe> Player in a browser that has Flash disabled, playback is handled via HTML5 <video> tags.

Apple explicitly prohibits autoplaying media in <video> tags in iOS Safari.

This is also the case for at least recent versions the default Android Browser or in Chrome. I'd strongly suspect that Android Firefox has the same restriction.