How to Prevent Video Pause When Mouse Moves Off-Screen

In some browsers, when you’re playing a video, the video player will automatically pause if your mouse moves off-screen or if the webpage with the video is no longer the active tab.

This issue commonly occurs in the following scenarios:

1. When you switch to another browser tab after opening a video page, causing the video page to no longer be the active one. The video player automatically pauses.
2. When the browser window is minimized, users may only want to listen to the audio and don’t need to watch the video. However, in this case, the video will still automatically pause.
3. If you have a dual-monitor setup and drag the video page to the extended screen while your mouse returns to the main screen, the video will automatically pause due to the mouse leaving the extended screen.

These three scenarios are quite common, but there could be other similar situations as well. The goal of this tutorial is to solve the issue where the video player pauses when the mouse leaves the current screen. This kind of mouse-triggered pause applies not only to video players but also to other web-based applications, such as browser games. The underlying principle is the same.

Solution 1

If you’re a programmer familiar with JavaScript, congratulations! You can solve this issue once and for all by running the following code.

setInterval(function () {
    var current_video = document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0];
    if (current_video.paused) {
        current_video.play();
    }
}, 1000);

Solution 2

If you’re not a programmer and don’t understand code, you can solve this issue by manually removing the mouse event listeners in the webpage. To do this, open the browser’s developer tools, find the event listeners related to blur, mouseout and visibilitychange and remove them. This will prevent the video from pausing when the mouse leaves the playback area.

Step 1: Open the webpage where the playback pause issue occurs.
Step 2: Open the browser’s developer tools. (Windows users can press F12, and Mac users can press Option + Command + I).
Step 3: In the developer tools, go to the Elements tab and then select Event Listeners.
Step 4: As shown in the image, delete the visibilitychange, blur and mouseout events. (Note that these three events may not all be present, depending on the design of the webpage).

Then expand the blur and visibilitychange options shown below and delete all the sub-options (simply click on the delete icon). There is no mouseout event on this webpage, so you can ignore it. If you encounter a webpage with a mouseout event, make sure to delete it as well.

FAQ

Question 1: Will deleting the visibilitychange, blur and mouseout events cause any damage to the webpage?
Answer: No, these three events are only used for listening purposes and won’t affect the webpage.

Question 2: How can I restore these three events?
Answer: Simply refresh the webpage to restore them.

Question 3: Will deleting these three event listeners affect other pages on the same website?
Answer: No, this method only works temporarily on the currently loaded webpage. Once the page is refreshed, the original version of the webpage with these event listeners will be reloaded from the server.

Question 4: Do I need to repeat this process every time I open a new webpage?
Answer: Yes, you will need to repeat these steps every time you open a new webpage.

Question 5: What do the visibilitychange, blur and mouseout event listeners mean?
Answer:

• visibilitychange event:
  This event is triggered on the document when the visibility of the page changes—either when the tab becomes visible or hidden. In simple terms, it sends the event when the user minimizes the page or switches to another tab.
  visibilitychange reflects whether the page is visible or not.
  You can check the visibility state of the page using the document.hidden property. When the page is hidden, document.hidden will be true; when it is visible, the value will be false.
  This event is often used to track how long a user stays on a page or to check if a user has left a specific page (such as an exam page).
• blur event:
  The blur event is triggered when an element loses focus.
  It is commonly used in scenarios like form validation.
• mouseout event:
  The mouseout event is triggered when the mouse pointer leaves an element.