How to Embed a YouTube Video with Sound Muted

Learn how to embed a YouTube video that autoplay but the sound is muted. The YouTube video will automatically play when the webpage is loaded but with the volume set to 0.

It is easy to embed YouTube videos in your website. You grab the default IFRAME embed code, paste it anywhere inside your web page and you’re done. YouTube offers basic customization – you can modify the player dimensions or hide the YouTube branding – but if you would like to exercise more control over the  behavior of the embedded player, YouTube Player API is the way to go.

This tutorial explains how you can embed a YouTube video that will automatically play when the web page is loaded but with muted audio.

For instance, a products website may use short screencasts to highlight features and these videos will autoplay when the page is loaded. The volume is however set to 0 and the user can manually click to un-mute the video. Similarly, if you are using YouTube video backgrounds, it makes more sense to embed muted videos that run in a loop.

Embed YouTube Player with Autoplay and Sound Muted

See the demo page to get an idea of what we are trying to do here. The page loads, the video plays but with the audio slide is all the way down.

This is easy. Go the YouTube video page and note down the ID of the video from the URL. For instance, if the YouTube video link ishttp://youtube.com/watch?v=xyz-123, the video id is xyz-123. Once you have the ID, all you have to do is replace YOUR_VIDEO_ID in the following code with that string.

<div id="muteYouTubeVideoPlayer"></div>
 
<script async src="https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api"></script>
<script>
 function onYouTubeIframeAPIReady() {
  var player;
  player = new YT.Player('muteYouTubeVideoPlayer', {
    videoId: 'YOUR_VIDEO_ID', // YouTube Video ID
    width: 560,               // Player width (in px)
    height: 316,              // Player height (in px)
    playerVars: {
      autoplay: 1,        // Auto-play the video on load
      controls: 1,        // Show pause/play buttons in player
      showinfo: 0,        // Hide the video title
      modestbranding: 1,  // Hide the Youtube Logo
      loop: 1,            // Run the video in a loop
      fs: 0,              // Hide the full screen button
      cc_load_policty: 0, // Hide closed captions
      iv_load_policy: 3,  // Hide the Video Annotations
      autohide: 0         // Hide video controls when playing
    },
    events: {
      onReady: function(e) {
        e.target.mute();
      }
    }
  });
 }
 
 // Written by @labnol 
</script>

Next place the edited code in your web page and the embedded video would automatically play but the sound is muted.

You can further customize the player by modifying the various player variables as commented in the code. For instance, if you set loop as 1, the video will play in a loop. Set fs to 1 to show the fullscreen button inside the video player. Internally, the player is embedded using the YouTube IFRAME API. When the page is loaded, the onReady event runs that mutes the video.

The embedded YouTube video will autoplay, but muted.

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Monetizing Blogs – The new way to make a living

Unless you are living under the rock for the past few years, you may have heard of the term “blogs” or personal diaries that are published online by millions of users across the globe. (Stats say that 71.5 million blogs exist as of today) Jumping the blogging bandwagon is simple — pick your niche, choose(…)

Unless you are living under the rock for the past few years, you may have heard of the term “blogs” or personal diaries that are published online by millions of users across the globe. (Stats say that 71.5 million blogs exist as of today)

Jumping the blogging bandwagon is simple — pick your niche, choose a blogging platform (like Blogger, WordPress) and start writing. The moment you hit that publish button, your thoughts and commentary instantly reach hundreds and thousands of souls with little effort.

You can blog on virtually any topic from shoes to iPods to cooking to stuffed toys — think of a niche that you are passionate about, write consistently and you will automatically find readers in some corner of the world who’ll enjoy your writing and keep coming back for more.

People have quit their 9-to-5 jobs to take up blogging as a full time profession and they aren’t complaining.

And blogging is not just about sharing expression; it can even help pay your utility bills provided your blog gets a decent amount of traffic. (Monetisation can be tough if there’s just one person reading your blog — you)

There are generally two options to generate revenue from blogging — you either make money because of the blog or from the blog. In the former case, people (clients or potential employers) can offer you consulting and other paying gigs because you have a blog that reflects your knowledge and command over some subject.

The other more popular option, which we discuss in detail, is about making money directly from the blog through advertising, sponsorships, paid reviews, donations or even selling merchandise (like T-shirts and mugs).

The grand-daddy of all advertising programmes is Adsense from the same company whose name is synonymous with internet search — Google. Adsense is a contextual advertising programme meaning they scan your web page and deliver ads based on the context. For instance, a website on mobile phones is unlikely to see random ads of cars or cooking recipes — the ads will be about mobile phones or something related like ringtones and chargers.

Adsense is hugely popular in India for several reasons — first, it’s the brand “Google”. They have tonnes of advertisers in their kitty so your web pages are less likely to run out of ad inventory. Google’s contextual advertising system is solid and known to deliver mostly relevant ads — therefore the conversation rates are high keeping both the advertisers and publishers happy.

[Yahoo! and MSN are also expected to launch similar advertising programmes for Indian publishers sometime in near future.]

Text Link Ads and Adbrite are other good sources of revenue for bloggers. You place a link on your website / blog pointing to the advertiser’s page and are paid based on the time for which the link is live.

Next in the list are affiliate programmes like the ones offered by Amazon, Commission Junction and eBay. These programmes pay only when the click turns into a sale — the payouts are higher than standard advertising rates but the probability of earning review is relatively low because a lot of people may quit the advertiser’s site without making a purchase.

Services like Payperpost and ReviewMe are also receiving lot of attention in the blogging community. Bloggers are paid anywhere between $10 and $250 for writing product reviews on their personal blogs. The blogger’s fee is dependent on factors including blog popularity and the blogger’s niche. For instance, a gadgets blog may invite a higher rate than a parenting blog or even vice-versa.

Blogs have tremendous potential in terms of revenue provided you are willing to make a dedicated and consistent effort. There are people who have quit their regular 9-to-5 jobs to take up blogging as a full-time profession and they aren’t complaining.

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Let non-English Visitors Read Your Website

Imagine someone coming to your site and leaving it the very next moment, not because the content was bad but because the site content was not written in his native language. It is a perfect case of a missed opportunity. Statistics show that the web has just 60% English speaking users. The rest may be(…)

Imagine someone coming to your site and leaving it the very next moment, not because the content was bad but because the site content was not written in his native language. It is a perfect case of a missed opportunity.

Statistics show that the web has just 60% English speaking users. The rest may be from Russia, Japan, the Middle East or other regions, where people are either less comfortable reading English content or can’t read and interpret the language at all.

By confining your website to English (or for that matter, just one language), you are missing a large group of people (or site traffic), who could have become potential customers or regular visitors if the website’s content had been written in their native language.

Most of the machine translation services like Google Translate, Altavista, Yahoo Babelfish, Lycos are powered by Systran software. So you can choose to incorporate either of these services and the results are pretty much the same in all cases.

Too see how this kind of translation works, type labnol.blogspot.com and click the country flags on the top. Say you click the page of Russia, the site would be translated from English to Russian using Google Translate.

If you are a small company who has little or no budget for translation, machine translation is the best option for you. Large companies with bigger budgets and international clients, hire professional translators to write their website content in different languages. There are a lot of translation companies on the internet, like World Lingo and Systran, that can do professional translation of your websites. With machine translation, you have little control over the grammar of the translated text, while in manual translation, the text is always grammatically correct.

Machine translation is limited just to a few languages like French, German, Chinese, etc but you can easily find a human translator for languages like Hindi, Farsi, Telugu, Arabic or even Sanskrit.

There’s also another option – where you download the translation software on your computer, translate content offline and publish the translated version of the pages on your site. This approach saves your visitor from requesting another site to do the translation. It looks slightly more appealing and professional, as the translated content is displayed using the same look n’ feel of your existing website. Systran, Babylon and WordWeb are popular softwares in this category.

You would notice that a lot of popular blogs and websites have a replica of their English websites in French, Russian, Spanish and other languages, to expand their subscriber base and readership levels.

There are basically two ways to add translation to your website: either you do it manually or let software do the job for you. We’ll discuss both the approaches here, weighing the pros and cons of each style.

Let’s look at the software option first. The translation software is hosted on the third party website and a visitor to your website sends a request to that site, to translate the page for him. The translation is done in real time.

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