YouTube Iframe embed auto play

Question

I am trying to embed the new iframe version of a YouTube video and get it to auto play.

As far as I can tell, there is no way of doing this by amending flags to the URL. Is there a way to do it by using javascript & the API?

Answer 1

at the end of the iframe src, add &enablejsapi=1 to allow the js API to be used on the video

and then with jquery:

jQuery(document).ready(function( $ ) {
  $('.video-selector iframe')[0].contentWindow.postMessage('{"event":"command","func":"playVideo","args":""}', '*');
});

this should play the video automatically on document.ready

note, that you could also use this inside a click function to click on another element to start the video

More importantly, you cannot auto-start videos on a mobile device so users will always have to click on the video-player itself to start the video

Edit: I'm actually not 100% sure on document.ready the iframe will be ready, because YouTube could still be loading the video. I'm actually using this function inside a click function:

$('.video-container').on('click', function(){
  $('video-selector iframe')[0].contentWindow.postMessage('{"event":"command","func":"playVideo","args":""}', '*');
  // add other code here to swap a custom image, etc
});