Everything You Need to Know About Embedding Videos on a Drupal website

Posted by Steve Kenley on Mar 6, 2015 7:00:00 AM

youtube banner

Often times, we would like to use videos to visually convey a thought or process. It might be easier to explain what you want to say using video footage, but embedding videos on your web page can seem like a difficult thing to do. On a Drupal site, it is actually quite simple.

The important thing to know is that Drupal makes it very simple as long as the video resides on an online video site, such as YouTube or Vimeo. Putting video files directly into the Drupal system will result in inconsistent results, depending on the users' software. Using YouTube or Vimeo, avoids those inconsistencies by providing an embed code for your video that can be placed directly into the code for your web page. The embed code will allow you to utilize the video site's player software to display the video, so everyone gets to see the video in the exact same format.

To embed a video on your site, start with uploading your video to YouTube or Vimeo. Once the video has been uploaded, find the "share" link and copy the embed code that is provided. The code can then be pasted into your sites page. Create a new page, or edit an existing page and switch to source mode in the editor by clicking the "Source" button in the top left corner of the editor tool bar. Once the editor is in source mode, paste the embed code into the editor.

Don't forget, there are several options for you to choose from when getting the embed code, to allow you to change the behavior of the video. For example you can choose to have the video auto play when the page is loaded, adjust the size of the video, and include links to related videos at the end of the video. Both popular video sites provide check boxes to include or exclude these features. Check out the video below, for all the details.

Steve Kenley

Written by Steve Kenley

Steve is a senior developer with a B.S. in IT Software Engineering and an M.S. in IT and Web Design. He's been keeping things running smoothly at Tribute Media since 2012.