Lite Video Embed

An ordinary YouTube or Vimeo embed loads the whole player — roughly a megabyte of JavaScript across a dozen requests — on every visit, before anybody has shown any interest in watching. It is usually the heaviest thing on the page, and it happens whether the video is played or not. Lite Video puts a poster image and a play button there instead. There is no iframe. On the click the real player is created, with sound, in the same box, and focus moves into it. With your own poster, nothing is requested from Google or Vimeo before that click — not the player, not a pixel, not a thumbnail. You can opt into YouTube's own thumbnail: one image request, no cookies or player, but the visitor's IP does reach Google, and the panel says so beside the setting. For anyone whose page is slow because of a video, or who has been told their embed needs consent before it loads. What it does not do: Vimeo has no fixed thumbnail address, so Vimeo videos need a poster of yours. Once open it is the provider's player and behaves like one. No chapters, no transcripts, no analytics. Free: one video per page, all of the above, no watermark. Pro: more videos on a page, and Vimeo.