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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

My largest annoyance after ads is autoplay html5 videos from news sites. CNN is especially bad. I wish Ublock could have an option to stop all html5 autoplay.

(yes, I've got the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" in chrome, and no, it mostly doesn't work)

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I particularly dislike the small sidebar videos that autoplay after a minute, and have absolutely nothing to do with the subject the page is ostensibly covering.

Open an article on protectionism, head off to Wikipedia to look up some unfamiliar terms, suddenly, "COMPANIES AROUND THE WORLD ARE DEVELOPING SEXBOTS. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS?"

Now my wife wants to know why I was researching sex bots, and the more I try to explain the situation the deeper I dig myself thanks to the Othello Effect.

Omg, yeah, autoplay is annoying in itself, but then add on top of that autoplay which runs on a loop, where even if you pause the video, the video begins playing again after a certain while.

I've even had some sites do this where during the autoplay the site would autoscroll back to the location of the video and then not let you scroll away from the video until it was done playing. You'd be somewhat interested in the article, so you say "Fine, I'll watch the whole fucking ad" and then go back to reading only to have your fucking reading inter-fucking-rupted 15 fucking seconds later. FUCK!!! Seriously, fuck these web developers who do this absolute bullshit.

CNN are dicks for this but I also blame Chrome and Firefox for not enforcing click to play.

When so much is controlled by JS these days, is it reasonable to expect they can block it all the time? With flash, at least it is one element that the browser can lock until you click it. With JS, who knows what/where the developer will inject and start playing audio / video.

Here's an idea: Don't go to CNN :) It's junk propaganda anyway.

You can try umatrix. It will block all media stuff under the other category if you configure it that way. You can then whitelist what you want.

In custom filter, add the extension type you want block. E.g. .mp4 .mkv .flv

It can even block external fonts (bandwidth's not cheap for me)

I would have given you a step by step tutorial but my PC is down ATM.

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