Automatically Loop A YouTube Video

Amber asks, "I figured out how to make my YouTube video play automatically, is there a way to make it keep playing over and over again without having to press the play button?"

YouTube enables a number of parameters by appending data to the URL of the video file. They do a lousy job of making the information easy to find, but once you know how it works implementation is fairly easy. I recently stepped through how to automatically start a YouTube video, with specific steps for MySpace users. The same trick will also work on any other online publishing space. To make the video loop, so that it restarts when it reaches the end, you need to add a slightly different command either in addition to the auto-start feature or by itself if you want viewers to click play the first time.

Keeping with the theme of putting YouTube videos on MySpace, the first thing you need to do is copy the Embed video code from the YouTube video you want to post:

Over on your MySpace blog click the link that says If you can't input your Blog, click here.

Paste in the YouTube video embed code and delete everything before <embed and everything after </embed> Keep only the equivalent of the highlighted text below:

If you want the video to start playing automatically when someone visits your MySpace page, add the &autoplay=1 option to the end of the video URL like this:

To have the video automatically start from the beginning by looping back when it reaches the end, add &loop=1 to the end of the URL like this:

This same trick will work whether you have a MySpace account or not. Also keep in mind that putting more than one video with these parameters on the same page will result in all the videos playing back and looping.