I have been fine hitherto working with lightboxes and just simply having an image “button” to fire videos off, however some requirements have recently changed in one particular scenario.
I have a custom area on a page that has is contained within a news rotator area. I’ve eliminated the rotation and it is now effectively just a menu, however I need to both define a custom size for a YouTube video player (the two default sizes, sans full screen, are not appropriate). Consequently I have to figure out how to define a custom size in between and preferably HTML5, falling back to Flash.
Next, I need to have an overlay image that will fall out of the way to uncover the YouTube player once clicked and activate the play function without interaction.
What’s the best process to follow here? I would prefer to use YouTube for several reasons over a custom HTML5 player (although there are nice options I’ve used).
A big bonus would be if I could leverage js to display another overlay image once the video has completed playing.
In the end I moved away from YouTube towards another solution. It’s not free, but it is a superior solution.
However, saying that @PaulIrish had a suggestion that merits review: http://www.blogseye.com/i-make-plugins/youtube-poster-plugin/
The solution I ended up leveraging in the end is Wistia. They have a solid player + experience and the metrics are really nice. I appreciate the prompt reply from support so there’s that personal human touch you completely miss from YouTube, and that alone is worth paying for to me.