Social Media 220: How to Customize Your YouTube Player

I have been interested in using a YouTube player to display some of our Mayo Clinic videos on our Mayo Web sites. One concern is that at the end of an embedded YouTube video, a list of related videos is automatically displayed at the end.

Here’s an example of a brief video I did to document my newly cleaned office as I prepared to start fresh in 2012:

With a quick Google search, I found this site, which makes it really easy to customize your player.

Among the changes you can make are:

  • Autoplay (have the video start automatically when the page is loaded)
  • Hide the video title
  • Hide the related videos list
  • Adjust size of the player
  • Enable or disable full-screen mode
  • Start the video somewhere in the middle.

Here is what it looks like after the customization:

Here’s another version with looping of the video (and showing the related videos):

 

The other neat thing about this online tool is that it lets you understand the syntax involved in the embed codes, so that you can adjust the settings manually.

Finally, here’s one more embed, in which I have our Mayo Clinic “Know Your Numbers” video start at the beginning of one of my two cameos.

 

Do you have other tricks for customizing display of your YouTube videos? How do you do it?

Blogging 363: Embed Facebook Videos in WordPress

Here’s another advantage of self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com, particularly as Facebook has extended the functionality of its video player.

For each video you have uploaded to Facebook, you have an option to embed it in your blog.

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When you click Embed this Video, you see a window pop up like this:

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And then, when you’ve copied the code, you can just paste it into your WordPress blog post in the HTML editor,

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so it looks like this:

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Which is what I did below, and you see the results. I had not indicated any privacy protections on this video, so you should be able to see it. Please let me know if you can’t.

This is an Aase family classic, in which I discuss the ins and outs of our birdhouse project with my firstborn son. Jake demonstrates exceptional bravery in completing the conversation even after receiving a grave injury.