Ever since Twitter introduced the video tweeting feature, people have been flooding my Twitter account with all kinds of video tweets. These small video clips start to play automatically by default and can be very annoying, not to mention the overload on the bandwidth usage and the system resources. Why Twitter enables auto-playing of these tweets is not very clear (and to be honest, is beyond my comprehension), but what we can do is disable the videos from being automatically played as you check your Twitter stream on a desktop PC, tablet computer or your mobile phone. Here is how it is done:
- Open the Twitter website in your web browser on PC (the instructions are similar for the mobile apps only the interface is a little different).
- Sign-in to your Twitter account. When successfully signed in, click on your profile picture on the top-right corner of the web page and select Settings from the menu that opens up.
- On the settings page, select Account from the left side if not already pre-selected.
- Scroll down a little and un-check Video autoplay checkbox from under the Content category.
- Click on the Save changes button to save your settings. From now on, you won’t see video tweets with auto-playing video clips. Instead you would have to click on the play button to watch the video clips.
Video tweets has certainly made Twitter much more interesting as now you can just capture an interesting looking video clip on your mobile phone and share it with all your Twitter followers. But you do not have to watch all the videos, you can configure Twitter to disable the video auto-play feature and watch these videos only when you want to watch them.