All of Fairfax Media's websites -- including the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age, have obnoxious auto-playing videos that load in the background, and interrupt you when you're halfway down the page, not to mention using up your bandwidth and download quotas for something you don't want.

I have long since uninstalled the Flash plugin from my computer, and so for a while, their Flash-based video player just wouldn't work in Safari, my primary web browser. It seems they have updated their video player so that it supports h.264 embedded video, which means Safari will happily play it now, no Flash needed. I do not like this at all.

I have the AdBlock extension installed on all my computers and web browsers, and I have managed to construct a rule that would prevent their video player javascript from running, thus stopping the auto-playing videos.

Just add the following line to your Adblock filters list (all in one line):

fd.videoplayer_min.js$domain=smh.com.au|
theage.com.au|brisbanetimes.com.au|nationaltimes.com.au|
watoday.com.au|domain.com.au

Mind you, this would prevent ALL video from playing on any of their domains too, which I don't have a problem with. YMMV