I listen to youtube playlists in the background fairly regularly and I've noticed some interesting changes in the last couple of weeks. Initially it began with an auto pause, and a popup saying video paused, click to continue.<p>More recently playlists have been looping the same song at seemingly random, looking to support forumss gives hundreds of comments reporting similar behaviour. (https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/16267152?hl=en)<p>Is youtube trying to drive adoption of youtube red by intentionally reducing the user experience for non premium users?
I haven't experienced this specifically on YouTube, but you may be talking about the Page Visibility API [0]. I've tried to disable it natively in Firefox and Chrome (without extensions) but with no avail. It can even tell if I switch desktops in i3wm. Here's two demos [1][2]. I'm guessing it's saving $$$ on bandwidth. I just want the option to turn it off.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/page-visibility-2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3.org/TR/page-visibility-2/</a><p>[1] <a href="http://daniemon.com/tech/webapps/page-visibility/" rel="nofollow">http://daniemon.com/tech/webapps/page-visibility/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://testdrive-archive.azurewebsites.net/Performance/PageVisibility/Default.html" rel="nofollow">https://testdrive-archive.azurewebsites.net/Performance/Page...</a>
It would not surprise me if that was the case.<p>I do get that "video paused" popup every once in a while, but I have never seen the looping behavior.<p>If this is happening to you a lot, a cool way to get around it can be using mpv/youtube-dl, they both support YouTube playlists:<p>mpv --no-video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLThlnilAqSEtI9HNfZEEyeFd4micqSmsJ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLThlnilAqSEtI9HNfZEEy...</a><p>or<p>mpv <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLThlnilAqSEtI9HNfZEEyeFd4micqSmsJ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLThlnilAqSEtI9HNfZEEy...</a><p>The --no-video flag hides the mpv OSC (a simple GUI, which is not necessary if you're playing songs). To navigate the playlist you'll need to learn a few keyboard shortcuts (<, >, ENTER, p), and more:<p><a href="https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#keyboard-control" rel="nofollow">https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#keyboard-control</a><p>This works very well and is multi-platform.<p>Unless YouTube puts DRM on the whole site, this should continue working as long as you keep mpv or youtube-dl updated. Sadly I don't think we can know for sure if they're doing this on purpose.