Contents

Video Plays Inline

Whether phones play the video inside the page instead of taking over the screen.

Where to find it
Labelled Video Plays Inline in the "Selected Component" section of the Modify drawer.
Offered by
The Video component. Other components do not have this setting.
Per device
Yes — you can set one value for every screen, or separate values for phone, tablet, and desktop.

In plain English

Phones have historically had a habit of hijacking video: press play and the clip leaps out of the page into a fullscreen player, covering everything around it. That is right for a feature film and wrong for a fifteen-second clip sitting in the middle of a paragraph.

Playing inline keeps the video where you put it, in the layout you designed, on phones as well as on desktops. It is on by default, and it is what makes background video possible at all — a clip that goes fullscreen the instant it plays cannot sit behind a headline.

Turning it off is unusual. It makes sense only when the video really is the main event and a small inline frame would do it a disservice.

What each option does

OptionWhat you will see
truePlay within the page, in the space you gave it.
falseLet phones open it fullscreen when playback starts.

When you would use it

  • Leave it on for anything embedded in a page layout, and for all background video.
  • Turn it off for a long-form video that deserves the whole screen on a phone.

How to change it

  1. Click the video component on the canvas.
  2. In the Modify drawer, open "Selected Component", then "Video Plays Inline".
  3. Choose "true" or "false".
One value, or one per device? Every input in this setting sits under a “Same value for all resolutions” checkbox. Leave it checked for a single value everywhere, or uncheck it to give phones, tablets, and desktops their own. How per-device values work.

Watch out for

  • Turning this off breaks background video on phones: the clip cannot stay behind your text if the phone insists on showing it fullscreen.
  • This only affects phones and tablets. Desktop browsers play inline regardless.

Related settings

For developers

The technical reference for what this setting produces: MDN: the playsinline attribute. You do not need any of it to use the setting — it is there for whoever is building the components or debugging the published page.

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