How to Hide, Loop, and Autoplay the Embedded YouTube Player

Tags: youtube, music, embed, iframe, loop, autoplay, looping, hide, hidden, player

Description:

One of the most enjoyably evil traditions of y2k-era web design was hiding a music player somewhere on your website or profile page and setting it to autoplay.

I realize I'm standing on the shoulders of giants (and I'll update the description with links to the other code snippets and comments/commenters I've borrowed info from), but the missing piece--how to actually force a song to loop--was hidden right here, on the Google developers' API documentation for the YouTube player:

This parameter (loop) has limited support in IFrame embeds. To loop a single video, set the loop parameter value to 1 and set the playlist parameter value to the same video ID already specified in the Player API URL.

In other words, YouTube's embedded iframe player interprets your looping music as a playlist, but a playlist that only has one song on it. As such, you need to get the video's ID by checking the actual url (youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID) and then replace the VIDEO_ID text both times it appears in the layout code.

The code snippet below also sets the player to 0 pixels wide and 0 pixels tall but, in some browsers (as another user discovered), you need to use the css tag class="hideobj" to hide the iframe player instead. If you want to kindly allow visitors to pause the audio, just remove the aforementioned tag entirely, and change the iframe player's dimensions to those of your choosing. :)

To make your song play only once (rather than indefinitely), you'll want to also change the text in the code from loop=1 to loop=0. Good luck!

Editing to add: Make sure this code snippet for YouTube's iframe player does not appear inside your css's "style" tags. I have mine just after the last </style>, before any actual text.

Copy and paste this code into the "About me" section of your Profile to use it.

Caution: This Layout was not inspected by SpaceHey — use it at your own risk.