Embedding video is getting more and more commonplace with websites. More sites are showing video as a way to engage and instruct users. One of the easiest ways to get video on your site is to sign up for a YouTube account, upload your video and use the embed code available under the video on YouTube.
You can just go with the default settings, or there are some useful parameters that can be added to the embed code. I’ll mention a few of the commonly used ones- you can find a more extensive listing here.
autoplay – set to 0 your video will not play until the player is loaded and the play button is clicked. The default setting is 0. Set to 1 and it will start playing once loaded.
rel – set to 0 and related videos won’t load when your video is done playing. Do you really want other people’s videos loading on your website? The default setting from YouTube is 1!
loop – do you want your video to play over from the beginning? Set loop=1 to keep going around! Default setting is 0.
theme – if your website would look cleaner with a lighter control bar set theme=light. Otherwise go with the default setting of dark
.
autohide – this parameter will determine whether the video control buttons will automatically be hidden once the the video starts playing. Set autohide=0 to force the video player controls to be visible throughout the entire video.
I hope that these tips are useful for you when you add video onto your website. Below I’ve put some sample code with some of the parameters highlighted so you can see how they would be in an embedded iframe code block.
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/ys_jgE_EF4I?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen autoplay=”1″ rel=”0″ theme=”light”></iframe>