TED.com + Safari browser on Mac = no audio

Factual Questions
1

I can no longer hear TED videos on my iMac using Safari. When I first open the video (which is not set to autoplay), the speaker mute control and volume slider at the bottom of the TED video window looks normal, but quickly acquires an X to indicate muted. Clicking on it opens a slider control with no slider. I haven’t found anything that lets the sound work. I did play with keyboard muting and volume controls to no avail.
The iMac generally can play sound. My music library plays in iTunes. The Safari tab is not muted. Youtube videos have sound in Safari. The TED videos work in Chrome. So far it seems only the combination of TED and Safari, which worked the last time I used them (don’t recall how long ago). I upgraded to Ventura 13.4 last night.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

P.S. I’ve been trying to post this query on the Apple discussion community and it just says my post can’t be saved. I don’t feel up to also debugging why I can’t debug there…

2

I’m doing this from Safari in Monterey, so it might be a little different in Ventura.

With a Ted.com video window open, go to Safari > Preferences > Websites > Auto-Play. Does the setting for ted.com say “Stop Media with Sound”? I hope it does, because that could be the problem. Set it to “Never Auto-Play” or “Allow All Auto-Play” depending on which you like. Then close the ted.com window, delete any ted.com cookies and try again. If it still doesn’t work, restart Safari.

3

Hey, THANK YOU! You fixed it. It said “Allow All Auto-Play”, not “Stop Media with Sound”, but I changed it to “Never Auto-Play” and that brought the sound back.

As an aside, I wonder why that worked, because it was not playing the video automatically anyway.