Chromecast and YouTube. A match made in heaven. That is, until recently. After an update push that went out to YouTube in the last day or so, it has been causing people to experience a rather annoying situation when visiting websites that have YouTube videos embedded. The videos would begin to play automatically. This is fine if you’re clicking on a video inside of the YouTube page, or clicking on a YouTube video link, in that case, we want the YouTube video to auto-play because it just makes things easier. Although that is also a preference of mine personally and some people might prefer to have control over hitting the play button. One can also just hit pause to stop playback.
When it comes to sites that have embedded YouTube videos though, the last thing you might think about is managing the playback of the YouTube video posted on the page, because generally they don’t play automatically, you actually have to hit play in this instance. After this was noticed by users, Android Police had reached out to Google for comment on what was causing the problem, and it was thought to initially be an issue with the Google Cast extension meant for streaming your desktop to the Chromecast, but after a little deliberation it seems that the problem lies within YouTube itself, which isn’t playing nice when the Google Cast extension is installed.
The good news? Google says that they have a fix ready and on the way so we shouldn’t be experiencing this problem for too long. What you can do in the mean time to prevent the auto play from happening is just uninstall the Google Cast extension for now. When the fix is pushed out you’ll be able to re-install it and have it on as normal. It’s also pointed out that you’ll want to completely restart your computer, and not just Chrome after the removal of the extension from your PC. While you wait for the issue to roll out which is scheduled to be later today, at least there’s somewhat of a workaround. Have any of you experienced this problem with YouTube videos auto-playing?