Put controls on the player (or include a separate play button that triggers a play event) so it can be started manually - this will cause it to fail when it reloads to fix a crash though.
I believe small videos without sound are allowed. I wonder if we make the video really small at first, then increase the size 10 seconds in after it has started (and turn on the sound?) if maybe that would work. I bet if it works though that Chrome will block behaviors like that in the future if the user doesn't interact.
Original report by Nicholas Santos (Bitbucket: nickrsan, GitHub: nickrsan).