If you open multiple tabs containing videos, during your research, here are a few firefox addons, that prevent the videos from auto-playing, and buffering. This prevents the noise, and the bogging down of your computer.

Be sure to go into your menu item, Tools > Add-ons, then select the extension, and set the preferences for "HTML5 Video Everywhere!". The "Autoplay Toggle" extension puts an icon on your tool bar, which can simply be clicked, to prevent auto play if the first one fails, or has a few second delay.

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HTML5 Video Everywhere! – Add-ons for Firefox

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/html5-video-everywhere/

About this extension

Some streaming sites video players suck. This add-on will replace them with browser built-in video player for higher performance and more stable experience.

Currently, It supports: Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Break, Metacafe. And more coming..

Note: Some legacy sites force using Flash player, you will need to install no-flash add-on to support them.

Thanks for browsers and Linux distributions developers who chose to provide the extension build into their products (including GNU IceCat, Trisquel)

Thanks for your donations and supporting us.

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Autoplay Toggle – Add-ons for Firefox

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autoplay-toggle/

About this extension

This addon adds a toggle button to the main toolbar for quickly toggling the "media.autoplay.enabled" preference setting.

By default, I usually try to disable all autoplay behaviour on videos/music/etc. to get around the scourge of noisy videos starting in the background, or videos automatically jumping to the next in some invisible playlist (or worse!). This however doesn't work all the time, and ends up breaking various media players in often bizarre ways!

I created this addon as a way to work around certain video players (*ahem* Vimeo's HTML5 player on certain videos) that refuse to work when autoplay is disabled, by making it possible to quickly pop autoplay back on just to watch the video, and then disable it again once I'm done.