You’re talking about a ‘feature’ of many video hosting services, including Instagram and YouTube too: autoplay. I can see from the video producer’s perspective why it’s nice to have a video immediately play once someone loads it, but from the user’s perspective, it’s awful, annoying and can end up costing you money if you’re accessing the service through a metered data service like your cellphone plan.
Like most every other site, however, Facebook has the ability for you to disable autoplay and sidestep that annoyance. I’m going to show you how to do this through the Web browser but will warn you that it’s likely that if you also access Facebook through your Android or iPhone, you might need to turn off autoplay in those settings too.
To start, click on the menu button on the top right for the main FB menu:
I’ve circled what you want:Â Settings.
Choose Settings from the Facebook menu to proceed. Now look on the left side for “Video”:
From this point it’s pretty easy to see what’s what as the two video setting options are well labelled:
Both of these are set poorly for my preferences, though. So let’s fix both!
First off, here are your choices for Facebook Video Default Quality:
As you can see, I suggest you switch to “HD if available”. Why not have things look the best they can?
And in terms of the Auto-Play Videos setting, here are your options:
I strongly recommend “Off”, not “Default”.
And that solves your Facebook video auto-play problems. Easy enough!
1 thought on “How do I disable video autoplay on Facebook?”
When I post a group of pictures on my FB home page, they immediately start changing positions. It looks neat, but I post them in a particular sequence. Unless someone starts with picture one, upper left, every other is out of place. Video setting is already on off.
How do I stop this? Thank you.