Automatically Start YouTube Video Playback

Zachary asks, "Once I have inserted a YouTube video into myspace, is there any way to get it to play automatically? If so, how?"

In a previous article I talk about how to add a YouTube video to MySpace, without all the headaches caused by the MySpace blogging interface. Making a video start playing automatically requires one additional step, which requires modifying the code provided by YouTube for posting. This step will also work if you want to make a YouTube video automatically start playing on any other type of Web page, although the exact steps for adding video to a particular blogging engine vary.

The first part of adding a YouTube video to MySpace is to copy the embed code from the YouTube site.

After copying the code and logging into MySpace, go to your blog page on MySpace and click the link to post a new blog

Title your blog post by adding a subject, then click the link that says If you can't input your Blog, click here. This step prevents MySpace from messing with the YouTube Embed code, which solves a big headache about posting video on MySpace.

If you're using the Mac OS X browser Safari, you won't see this option, so you can skip this step.

Paste the YouTube Embed code in the Body section of your blog post using either Ctrl+P or by right-clicking and choosing Paste from the menu. Delete everything before <embed and everything after </embed> You should keep only the equivalent of the highlighted text below:

Next you need to modify the video source URL in the code by adding &autoplay=1 to the end of the URL as show below:

After you add the autoplay parameter, simply preview and post your latest entry to your MySpace blog.

You can see an example of this in action on the latest post on my own MySpace profile.

The one word of caution I suggest here is that if you frequently post YouTube videos to your MySpace blog and you add the autoplay parameter to all of them, when someone goes to your blog page ALL the videos you set autoplay=1 will start playing at the same time.

You may also want to make your YouTube video repeat.