This page explains how to easily transfer YouTube channel videos to VideoPress.
Getting Started
We recommend you perform the import from a Desktop Computer environment and on a fast internet connection due to the large size of video files. You should also make sure that Jetpack VideoPress is installed and activated on your site, otherwise you will not be able to import the videos to VideoPress.
Export Videos from YouTube
To export your YouTube videos, visit the data transfer page at https://takeout.google.com. You may need to log in or enter your Google/YouTube password again to visit that page.
You’ll be presented with a long list of Google products to export from. Since you only want to export your YouTube videos, click the “Deselect all” button:
Next, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and tick the box in the “YouTube and YouTube Music” section, then the “Next step” button.
You’ll then be presented with export options. We recommend choosing the “Send download link via email” option and a larger size for the Zip file:
Now you’ll need to wait for the link to arrive to your email. It can take from a few minutes to many hours (or days even) to receive the link, depending on the amount of videos in your channel. Once you receive the link, download the Zip file(s) to your device and double-click them to uncompress the videos. Your videos will be in a sub-folder, navigate to “Takeout” -> “YouTube and YouTube Music” -> “videos” to find them.
Import Videos to the WordPress Media Library
Next, visit your site’s media library (At {your-sites-domain}/wp-admin/upload.php), and drag and drop the videos you want to import directly into the browser window. You can multi-select files on your desktop by holding down the cmd or ctrl keys while clicking on the files. We recommend adding videos in groups of 10 or less so that you don’t overwhelm your browser or internet connection.
The videos will upload to your Media Library right away and VideoPress will convert them for optimal playback on your site!
Editing the Videos
After the upload completes you can edit the title, description and other details of the video by simply clicking on it in the media library.
Add Imported Videos to Posts
Now that you have imported your videos to the Media Library, you’re all set to add them to Posts using the Video Block. View the guide here for detailed instructions.
Check how popular your Jetpack VideoPress videos are, with Jetpack Stats.
Jetpack Stats, including video stats, are only available in the Jetpack plugin. If you’re using the individual VideoPress plugin and want stats for your videos, please install the Jetpack plugin as well.
Video views have their own section within the Jetpack Stats page under Jetpack > Stats in your WP Admin.
In both WP Admin and WordPress.com, video stats are on the Traffic tab.
You can also find Jetpack Stats on your Stats page on WordPress.com.
Scroll down to find the video stats section.
Jetpack VideoPress videos on your site are listed by title, along with how many views a particular video has received.
To view detailed stats for a video, click on the video’s title.
Click on View details to view more detailed stats for all videos.
Impressions: The number of times a video was loaded on the page.
Hours watched: The total number of hours that the video has been watched by all viewers.
Views: The total number of how many times the video was played.
Chapters are a great way to split up longer videos and organize them into different sections. Your visitors can see what each section is about and skip to their favorite parts.
Click the “Done” button once it is finished uploading.
Navigate to the block settings for the video in the editor sidebar. Make sure you’ve clicked on the VideoPress block in the editor section of the screen, then click the ‘cog’ icon below the Publish button to make the block settings appear.
In the Description box, add a list of timestamps in minutes and seconds, along with corresponding chapter titles.
Make sure that the first timestamp starts with 00:00.
Add at least three chapter entries, in consecutive order, with at least 10-second intervals between each.
For example:
00:00 Intro 00:24 Mountains arise 02:38 Coming back home 03:04 Credits
Click on the Text Tracks icon in the block toolbar, as shown below:
Click on Upload track to upload your .vtt file. The Label and Source Language fields will automatically be populated if nothing is inserted.
Click Save.
When you preview your post, the subtitles menu will appear in the Jetpack VideoPress player, with your subtitles track as an option for viewers to select.
It is not possible to associate a .vtt file for closed captions to a file directly in the Media Library. The VideoPress block must be added first. However, when you upload a track file to the video via the above steps, it gets associated with the media file itself. If you reuse the video file elsewhere, the track will be already in place.
Viewers can use the Captions Settings menu in the VideoPress player on the front-end of the site to customize the appearance of the subtitles or captions.
VideoPress Shortcodes allow you to display your videos on any post or page on your site, giving you control over your media and content.
Getting a Shortcode via WP Admin
Go to your WP Admin.
Click Media.
Click on the video you need a shortcode for.
Copy the shortcode in the video details.
Getting a Shortcode via WordPress.com
Go to WordPress.com, select your site from My Sites.
Click Media.
Click on the video you need the Shortcode for
Click Edit.
Copy the Shortcode in the video details.
Using VideoPress Shortcodes in your Posts and Pages
Shortcodes can be directly pasted into any of your posts or pages on your site, or you can add via a Shortcode Block.
Example: Pasted directly into a page or post.
Click the Add New Block button and select Shortcode to create a Shortcode Block
A newly created Shortcode Block – You can paste your Shortcode here.
Your video will not be displayed while editing, you will only see the Shortcode Block. You can click Preview to see how your video looks and make necessary edits.
When you preview your Shortcode, it will be visible on your page or post allowing you to use all of the VideoPress features available. Upon previewing, you can head back to your page or post you are building to make any necessary changes via Shortcode attributes which are listed below:
Preview of Shortcode added to Post or Page.
Get Control Over Your VideoPress Shortcodes with Attributes
You can add attributes to your Shortcode to change specific characteristics of your video. Here is a list of available attributes:
w=X for width in pixels, do not include units
h=Y for height in pixels, do not include units
hd=true/false to force HD playback
freedom=true/false to force only use open source video formats
autoplay=true/false to automatically play the video when it loads
loop=true/false to automatically play the video over and over
controls=false to hide the default video controls when displaying a video
Adding Attributes to Your VideoPress Shortcode
Copy and Paste your Shortcode as outlined in the above steps.
Attributes will be added before the last bracket on your Shortcode
[videopress uhAZ9tzd attribute=value]
You can add a range of different attributes for your video, in just one Shortcode.
If you wanted to change the height to 200 and width to 600, enable autoplay and loop your video, it will look something like this
The VideoPress shortcode can only be used to display videos on the site the video was uploaded to. To embed a video on a different site, you can use the Embed (HTML) code, which can be found by viewing the direct video link and clicking the share icon at the top right of the video.
Related Support Articles
These articles go over topics that are helpful when using Jetpack VideoPress via either plugin:
Host your videos on WordPress.com rather than your host’s servers. Your videos will load more quickly on your website, and not take up any space from your host’s storage limits. Take control of your branding, and say goodbye to third-party players’ logos on your site.
The latest version of WordPress. If your version of WordPress is out of date, you’ll see a prompt to automatically upgrade with a single click, or can upgrade manually.
A WordPress.com account. Don’t have one yet? Sign up for one here, or create one during the Jetpack connection flow. You only need one WordPress.com account to access all our services (including Akismet, Crowdsignal, Gravatar, and WordPress.com itself). If you use any of these services, you already have a WordPress.com account to connect to Jetpack. You can reset your WordPress.com password if you need to.
A publicly accessible WordPress site: no password protection or Coming Soon / Maintenance Mode plugin in use.
Go to WP Admin -> Jetpack -> My Jetpack. Then click, Purchase.
Once purchased, VideoPress will be enabled for your site. Click Manage to view VideoPress Settings:
Make sure VideoPress is enabled on the management page in Settings.
You can select your site-wide video privacy here and see your VideoPress storage usage.
Activate VideoPress with the VideoPress plugin
If VideoPress is the only Jetpack feature you want to use, then the single plugin is probably the best option for you. This dedicated plugin also creates a VideoPress dashboard directly in WP Admin, where you can upload and manage all of your videos. Take
Add your first video
You can upload videos a couple of different ways:
Upload via WordPress.com
Upload via VideoPress Block
Upload via the VideoPress Dashboard (if you have the VideoPress plugin active)
Please read more in Uploading Your Videos, including full details about video format requirements.
With Jetpack VideoPress, you can select your privacy settings whether leaving your videos to your default site privacy settings, public, or private. You can also determine whether all of your current and future videos are private.
Video Privacy settings are accessible in the VideoPress Block settings panel.
Setting Your Privacy
You can access and change your video privacy settings directly from your Media Library or within a post or page that you are adding a video to.
Change Privacy in the Media Library:
Go to WordPress.com.
In the top left corner, click Switch Site and select the Jetpack-connected site you’re working on.
Go to Media.
Click on the video(s) that you want to change privacy settings on or upload a new video by clicking the Add New button.
When you click on the video(s) you’ll then click the Edit button, this will open a pop-up with your video and all applicable settings.
Under the Privacy setting you’ll see options for Site Default, Public or Private. Select your desired privacy setting and then click Done.
Change Privacy in a Post or Page:
To get started access a post or page that has an uploaded VideoPress video or create a new one. Once you have selected your page or post add a video and allow the upload process to begin.
In the right sidebar under Block Settings, scroll down to Video Privacy. Here you will see that privacy will default to your site privacy settings.
By selecting the dropdown you can select Site Default, Public, or Private. Select the option you need for your video.
When you choose Private only members of your site will be able to view the video on your post or pages. Non-Members will see a video player that looks like the image to the right.
This video uploaded does not have a poster image. If you selected to show a poster image that image would be displayed with the private overlay message.
Both videos have post images selected.
If you have multiple videos within a post or page that you’d like to be selective about privacy you can change the privacy settings for each video. For example, to the right, you can see two videos that are set as Public.
When you change the block settings for one of these videos to be Private instead of public a non-member of your site will see this instead:
One video is public and another is private.
Advanced Settings
If you prefer to be selective about which videos are private or public you can manage each block’s settings through the steps above.
If you prefer all of your videos to be private except to members of your site you can change those settings into perpetuity for your site.
If you’re using the Jetpack Plugin
In your site’s WP Admin, go to Jetpack > Settings > Performance
Scroll down to Media > VideoPress > Video Privacy
Toggle “Restrict views to members of this site”
If you’re using the Jetpack VideoPress Plugin
In your site’s WP Admin, go to Jetpack > VideoPress.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Toggle “Video Privacy: Restrict views to members of this site”
Once that option is toggled your videos will now be restricted to members of your site and no longer visible to non-members.
Jetpack VideoPress allows you to upload videos from your computer to be hosted on WordPress.com, rather than on your host’s servers. You can then insert these on your self-hosted Jetpack site.
To add HD, ad-free video hosting to your WordPress site, check out Jetpack VideoPress.
This page describes how to use Jetpack VideoPress when using the Classic Editor plugin or a Classic block. You can find instructions for the standard block editor here.
In the post editor, position the cursor where you’d like the video to be displayed. Then click the “Add Media” button to bring up the Media Library view. From that view, select your video.
Adjusting Video Settings
After embedding a video, you can adjust a few settings that will affect how it behaves on this page/post. Select the video, click the pencil icon, and then update the settings as needed.
Adjusting Sharing Settings
Jetpack VideoPress makes video playback and sharing a simple experience for your viewers through our default sharing options. Using the share links, your viewers will be able to easily download and embed your videos. By default, clicking the sharing icon in the top right of the video player reveals the following sharing options:
This will give anyone viewing your videos the option to download the video file in a variety of formats, and options for sharing the video permalink or iframe embed code. If you would like to disable sharing, you can do that in the video settings in the Media Library.
Note: Disabling the sharing options removes the functionality from the video player, but it is still possible to download the video from your browser. We take reasonable steps to prevent embedding on other sites by hiding the sharing options, which should stop most attempts.
Video Stats
All videos come with stats tracking, which can be viewed within your Jetpack Stats. You can scroll down and find the “Videos” stats:
Clicking on “Video” will take you to the page that shows more statistics:
Impressions: The number of times a video was loaded on the page.
Hours watched: The total number of hours that the video has been watched by all viewers.
Views: The total number of how many times the video was played.
Additional Information
The VideoPress seekbar automatically changes color for a better video-watching experience. The color-changing effect can be activated and deactivated by appending the useAverageColor parameter to the VideoPress video URL and setting it to true or false.
Jetpack’s video hosting supports MP4 (.mp4, .m4v), QuickTime movies (.mov), Windows Media Video (.wmv), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), MPEG (.mpg), 3GPP ( .3gp ) and 3GPP2 ( .3g2 ).
Video hosting also allows you to retrieve a video’s [wpvideo xyz] shortcode, and insert it into your post. You can then modify the video by adding these parameters in the shortcode:
w=X for width in pixels, do not include units
h=Y for height in pixels, do not include units
hd=true/false to force HD playback
freedom=true/false to force only use open-source video formats
autoplay=true/false to automatically play the video when it loads
loop=true/false to automatically play the video over and over
at=x to specify a time offset in seconds that the video will start
All files are optimized for progressive loading, enabling viewers to play your video while it downloads.
Jetpack’s Video block enhances the existing WordPress Video block and allows you to upload videos from your computer to be hosted on WordPress.com, rather than on your host’s servers. You can then insert these videos into posts and pages on your Jetpack site.
Note: this page describes how to use the Video Block when using the Block Editor. You can find instructions on adding a Video on the Classic editor here. For general features and FAQs, please see our marketing page.
You can add the Video block by searching and/or selecting it from the Jetpack section of the block selector:
Be sure to select the Video block rather than the VideoPress block as these are different.
See Jetpack Blocks for detailed instructions on adding blocks.
Adding a Video
You can add a video directly within the block itself by dragging the file to the block or using one of the three buttons: Upload, Media Library, and Insert from URL.
Upload will allow you to upload a new video file from your computer.
Media Library allows to you select any video file that’s already been uploaded to your library, including those that have been uploaded to our servers.
Insert from URL allows you to insert any video URL, both from Jetpack’s video hosting and third-party services. If you insert a URL from another supported block type, such as YouTube, the Video block will automatically transform into a YouTube block.
Links added to the video block from external services will transform into their respective block.
Once the video is embedded in the page, you can add an optional caption if desired.
Block Toolbar
The video block toolbar supports all alignment options.
As with the image block, the Video block can be inline-aligned with the paragraph below it by clicking the left-align or right-align icons.
Edit Video
The edit option in the Video block’s toolbar will allow you to select a new video file for your block. Use this if you need to replace the video file in your block.
Block Settings
Every block has specific options in the editor sidebar in addition to the options found in the block toolbar. If you do not see the sidebar, simply click the ‘cog’ icon next to the Publish button.
The block settings can be found in the sidebar.
Autoplay, Loop, & Muted
These options let you set your video file to autoplay when someone visits the page or post. Looping lets you choose if the video file repeats after it’s finished. You can also choose to mute the video if your circumstance requires it.
Note: some browsers do not respect the autoplay settings, so that setting may not work in all browsers. You may need to enable mute for autoplay to work in those instances.
The block settings include Autoplay, Loop, Muted, Playback Controls, Preload, and a Poster Image.
Playback Controls
Toggle this option to show or hide the playback control overlay on the video.
Preload
This option allows you to select how much of the video file is downloaded when the page or post is loaded. While it may be tempting to go ahead and have the whole file download automatically, keep in mind that this can slow your page’s load speed down.
There are three settings:
None – Nothing about the video file is downloaded automatically. The download of the video file only begins when your visitor clicks the Play button. This is the fastest setting.
Metadata – Only basic info about the file will be downloaded automatically. Like the None option, the download of the video file only begins when someone clicks Play. This setting is also very fast, as the only thing downloaded is text. On a fundamental level, there’s not a big difference between None and Metadata.
Auto – The entire video file is downloaded, regardless of whether the visitor clicks the Play button or not. This makes the biggest impact on your page or post’s load speed, especially with larger video files.
Poster Image
Optionally, you can choose a poster image that will be displayed before a video is set to Play, this can be useful if the first frame of the video isn’t necessarily appealing or indicative of the video content.
Advanced
The advanced tab lets you add a CSS class to your block, allowing you to write custom CSS and style the block as you see fit.
The advanced section lets you add a CSS class to your block.
This feature is deactivated by default. It can be activated/deactivated at any time by toggling the “Enable high-speed, ad-free video player” setting in the Video section at Jetpack → Settings → Performance in your dashboard.
Data Used
Site Owners / Users
In order to track video plays for your stats, we will send the site ID, post ID (on which the video is played), and domain name of your site with these events.
If Google Analytics tracking is enabled, some video information (size, quality, format, file name, ID, etc.) will be sent there, as well.
Please refer to the privacy documentation for WordPress.com Stats and Google Analytics for more information on the data used to record video play tracking.
Site Visitors
Please refer to the privacy documentation for WordPress.com Stats and Google Analytics for more information on the data used to record video play tracking.
Activity Tracked
Site Owners / Users
Video plays.
We track when, and by which user, the feature is activated and deactivated.
Jetpack provides creative and performant solutions for you to showcase photos and videos without slowing down your site.
Videos
Jetpack VideoPress
To display videos on your site, Jetpack VideoPress offers a clean and ad-free player designed to put your content in the spotlight. Its deep integration lets you manage everything directly from WP Admin, and upload videos directly to VideoPress which helps to save site storage space on your web server. Also, VideoPress benefits from state of the art CDN which ensures the delivery of high-quality playback at the ideal bitrate and resolution.
Jetpack VideoPress is available to anyone with a Jetpack Complete or VideoPress plan, and you can try it out for free for one video with a file size of up to 1 GB. If you’re ready, get started here!
Loom block
You can easily embed a Loom video by using the Loom block which comes by default with Jetpack.
Photos
Jetpack offers a variety of options to showcase photos on your site.
Performance with Images
Image CDN (formerly Photon) is an option included in Jetpack’s Site Accelerator. By hosting your images from our servers, we alleviate the load on your server and help provide faster image loading for your readers.
To showcase you photos in a creative way, Jetpack offers a variety of blocks:
Tiled Gallery block, to display your image galleries as a tiled mosaic, circular grid, square tiles, or tiled columns. Then, you can enhance the gallery display by activating the Carousel option, this will launch a gorgeous full-screen photo browsing experience of the gallery.
Slideshow block, to showcase an image slideshow into a post or page.
Image Compare block, to display and compare the differences between two images side by side (or above and below).
Story block, to combine photos and videos to create an engaging, tappable, full-screen slideshow.
Open License Libraries
Need a hand finding beautiful images for your content? You can do that by tapping into libraries offering openly-licensed images, thanks to:
Openverse Media Library Support which gives you access to over 600 million Creative Commons licensed and public domain image files.
Pexels Free Photo Library, it includes over 40,000 beautiful copyright-free images to use on your site.
Integrate with Third-Party Services
Do you use Google Photos, Instagram, Pinterest? Or envoy communicating through GIFs? If so, you can integrate them all on your site with:
Google Photos integration, connect Jetpack to your Google account to use your Google Photos in Jetpack’s image-related blocks.
Latest Instagram Posts block, to display your most recent Instagram images on your site.
Pinterest block, to embed yours or other’s Pinterest content on your site.
GIF block, easily search for and embed an animated GIF image from Giphy directly into a post or page on your site.
