CMS Lightbox vimeo not autoplaying on chrome

Design help CMS
1

I have tried adding &autoplay=1 to the end of the link, it makes no difference.

Click on the lightbox, it opens and plays but then immediately pauses.

Same thing not happening in safari 17.1 - that autoplays just fine.

This is a lightbox link fed from a CMS collection but I have another site with native lightbox links and the behaviour is the same.
I’ve seen multiple reports of the same issue but seemingly no solution?
There are many similar websites using vimeo lightboxes which auto play fine (since there is always user input by clicking the link to play) so it’s not a chrome policy issue.

2

It depends on your browser and configuration but generally;

  1. Browsers will only autoplay video when it’s also muted
  2. On mobile devices, browsers will only autoplay when the device is on wifi

Mute the video and it should autoplay on most devices.

3

Thanks for your reply Michael.
But from the official chrome docs (here), it states:

  • Autoplay with sound is allowed if:
    • The user has interacted with the domain (click, tap, etc.).

By clicking the play button that fires the Lightbox, the user has made a choice to play the video and that interaction should mean once the Lightbox opens, the video plays straight away.

This doesn’t seem to be a chrome problem (because other website behave normally in that when you click the play button and the Lightbox opens, the Vimeo video plays straight away without any further clicks necessary) but a webflow one.

4

Maybe. It likely depends on how the video itself is setup. If you’re using Webflow’s Lightbox with the media set to a video then you’re using Embedly for the video framing. I’d be curious to see if the allow attribute is set on the iframe it generates.

If not, you may be able to fix that with script.

Alternatively you can switch to a different lightbox solution and then you have total control over your video embeds.