start/play embedded (iframe) youtube-video on click of an image

Question

I'm trying to start playing an embedded youtube video by clicking an image. The idea is to have an image on top of a video, and when the image is clicked it fades out and starts playing the video.

I'm using jquery to fade the image, and was hoping to find a way to play or click the video using jquery as well.

The fading is working fine, but I can't figure out how to trigger the video to play. I got it to work on a couple of browsers by setting the video to autoplay and hide it, and then fade in the video when the image was clicked. On most browsers the video would autoplay when faded in, but in chrome it started to autoplay even when it was hidden. It didn't work well in iOS either.

Since I'm pretty new at this, I'm not even sure if I'm writing it 100% correct, but I've tried something like this without success:

     $('#IMAGE').click(function() { $('#VIDEO').play(); });

So, how would I go about to make the video play on an image click? Is there a way to play the video when the image is clicked, just using jquery?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The quick and dirty way is to simply swap out the iframe with one that has autoplay=1 set using jQuery.

THE HTML

Placeholder:

<div id="videoContainer">
  <iframe width="450" height="283" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID_HERE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen wmode="Opaque"></iframe>
</div>

---

Autoplay link:

<a class="introVid" href="#video">Watch the video</a></p>

THE JQUERY

The onClick catcher that calls the function

jQuery('a.introVid').click(function(){
  autoPlayVideo('VIDEO_ID_HERE','450','283');
});

---

The function

/*--------------------------------
  Swap video with autoplay video
---------------------------------*/

function autoPlayVideo(vcode, width, height){
  "use strict";
  $("#videoContainer").html('<iframe width="'+width+'" height="'+height+'" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/'+vcode+'?autoplay=1&loop=1&rel=0&wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen wmode="Opaque"></iframe>');
}