Putting a video on a page

The Video player element plays one video. It can play a file from your own media library, or embed one from YouTube. Only YouTube involves a third party.

A YouTube video is a third-party embed. ClickWhale holds it back until the visitor has accepted functional cookies, showing a placeholder with an Allow and play button in its place. A video from your own media library is served by your own site and plays for everyone, immediately.

Video source

Video source is the first setting, and it changes which of the others you see.

From media

Pick a file from your media library with Video, MP4 or WebM. Poster image is the still picture shown before playback starts; without one the player shows the first frame, which is often black.

The player is ClickWhale's own, served from your site. Nothing is requested from anyone else, so nothing is held back by the cookie bar.

Keep an eye on file size. There's a 20 MB limit per upload, and even under it a video is by far the heaviest thing on a page. See Uploading and managing your files.

YouTube

Paste the address into YouTube URL. ClickWhale accepts any of the forms YouTube hands out:

• the address bar link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…
• the Share link: https://youtu.be/…
• an embed, Shorts or live link
• or just the eleven-character video id on its own

The embed is built for you, and it uses YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain (youtube-nocookie.com). That reduces what YouTube stores. It doesn't make the embed first-party, which is why the consent placeholder is still there.

Use YouTube when the video is long, when you want it findable on YouTube too, or when the file is simply too big to host. Use your own file for a short loop, a background clip, or anything you'd rather no third party knew about.

Autoplay and Loop

Both apply to either source.

Autoplay starts the video without a click, muted: browsers refuse to autoplay video with sound, and one that tried would not start. So autoplay is for decoration: a silent looping clip behind a heading. Anything a visitor is meant to listen to needs a real play button.

Loop restarts the video when it ends.

Both together (muted, looping, autoplaying) is the classic "video as a background" setup.

Styling

A video element takes border, border radius and box shadow. Its width comes from the column, container or div it sits in, and its shape from the video itself, so there's nothing else to set.

What visitors see before they consent

With the cookie bar on and a YouTube video on the page, a visitor who hasn't accepted functional cookies sees a box explaining that the video comes from an external provider that places cookies, with an Allow and play button. Pressing it grants the functional category and loads the video, just that one category, nothing else.

For a visitor who declines, every YouTube embed on the page is a grey box. See The cookie bar.

Common issues