Adding video

Where can I add video?

You can add Video in two different places for use in your Hijack. Most often, you’ll be using the options found in the ‘Video’ tab to configure the background videos when setting up each Chapter. However you can also add a video intro for users to see when they first open your Hijack (before they begin browsing chapters).

Types of video

The system can accommodate both Standard and 360 video files hosted either on the WordPress site itself or on an external platform. Hijack even supports live streams from Facebook and YouTube, which we cover in a separate tutorial here.

Hijack offers the unique possibility of adding a ‘tour’ timeline enhancement to your 2D and 3D videos. Select either ‘2D Tour’ or ‘3D Tour’ to reveal a new set of options below. Please read the article on ‘Adding Spotlights to Video Tours’ for more detailed instructions on this.

Externally, or Hijack-hosted video?

Once you have chosen the relevant video type in the dropdown, use the ‘External Video’ toggle to specify where the video exists. Toggle ‘No’ if the video is to be uploaded to the WordPress Media Library or ‘Yes’ if the video is hosted elsewhere.

If toggled ‘Yes’, the final field will prompt you to type in the URL of the video. If toggled ‘No’, an ‘Add File’ button will appear allowing you to select a previously-uploaded video from the site’s Media Library or to upload a new video from your local computer.

Working with YouTube videos

For introduction videos, we are able to leverage the iframe API. This allows us to append url parameters to make the video do things we want it to.

In a lot of cases you will want to change the default URL for these YouTube embeds to contain some common parameters. Here is a example of the standard URL:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/yWsFXT904bg

And here is the same URL after applying some common parameters:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/yWsFXT904bg?autoplay=1&mute=1&loop=1&playlist=yWsFXT904bg&modestbranding=1&rel=0

Let’s take a look at what they do:

• autoplay=1&mute=1 – This makes your video play automatically. Most browsers will not autoplay a video unless it is muted.
• loop=1&playlist=yWsFXT904bg – This makes the video loop, but youtube demands that you also pass the video ID through as a playlist parameter too. Don’t ask us why, it’s super weird, but it’s documented on the iframe API documentation.
• modestbranding=1 – This doesn’t doo too much, but tones down the references to YouTube
• rel=0 – This removes related videos from other brands. If shown (it would only show if you weren’t looping) you would see related videos from the same channel.