FV Player Autoplay with Preload for faster video start times

Back in the FV Player 7 days we used to simply autoplay the first video on the page. This was not ideal as it would autoplay even if it was not visible after loading the page and user had to scroll down to it.

This was improved in FV Player 8, where we decided to only autoplay the video if it can be actually seen. That lead to the two autoplay modes – Autoplay Video in Viewport and Scroll Autoplay.

Now FV Player 8.1 was released and it makes the videos faster to autoplay using preload. If the autoplay is enabled and the video is below the fold, FV Player will already preload it. That ensures fast video start time once user scrolls down to it.

Also, the next video on the page also gets preloaded. This greatly improves video loads times when you have an article with multiple videos which user watches as he reads through the text.

The two minor changes are:

• Previously the autoplay would only trigger when scrolling down the page – now it works both ways
• Previously pausing a video would stop further viewport-based autoplay on the page – now resuming a video with re-enable autoplay as the user continues scrolling

This new behavior is also useful for CSS scroll snap which you can use to create an experience similar to YouTube Shorts.

Here’s a video of our Snap Scrolling Container demo page. It shows the behavior when using iPhone.

Link

Martin Viceník

Martin graduated as an engineer in Computer Science from Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. He grew up in Liptovský Mikuláš in northern Slovakia next to the beautiful Tatra mountains. He is the developer behind our FV Player.