Note
Player controls cannot be customized for audio files.
The Controls tab in the Customize menu includes options to tweak your video’s controls and playback behavior.
Start and End Behavior
In the Start/End options section of the Controls tab, there are a few options to customize the playback behavior of your video. Check the Autoplay option to ensure your video plays automatically when a viewer visits the page.
Open the dropdown menu to select one of three options for the end behavior of your video:
Pause on the last frame
Reset to the first frame
Loop the video
Autoplay Your Video
Autoplaying videos can help grab your viewers’ attention. Once the Autoplay option is enabled, you can choose between the following autoplay variations:
Click for sound will autoplay the video in a muted state with the option to manually enable sound.
Muted will play the entire video silently.
Play with sound will begin playback with audio, meaning the video will only autoplay in browsers that allow autoplaying videos with sound.
Play sound if possible will enable the video to autoplay everywhere, silently where required, and with sound where permitted
Tip
The Muted setting is a great option for background videos and content without audio.
Note
Autoplay with sound is currently blocked by default on mobile devices, Chrome, and Safari. For the best experience across all devices and browsers, we recommend the Muted or the Play sound if possible options. Videos set to autoplay with sound will display a thumbnail and play button in environments where play with sound is blocked.
Loop Your Video
By default, videos will pause on the last frame once the video ends. Choose Loop the video from the end behavior dropdown menu to set the video to replay continuously.
Big Play Button
The big play button overlays on your thumbnail. It’s visible before your viewer clicks play and indicates that your image is a video. Check the Video length on play button option to display the video duration beneath the big play button.
To customize the big play button further with custom development, check out our Player API.
Small Play Button
The small play button will pause and play your video. It will appear on your video when the viewer hovers over the video during playback. This option will also be shown if the Controls Visible on Load box is checked.
Play Bar
The play bar allows your viewers to scrub through your video. Disabling the play bar will prevent viewers from skipping ahead and jumping backward in your video. When the play bar is enabled, viewers can hover over it to reveal thumbnail previews of any point in the video.
Captions Control
When enabled, the captions control allows viewers to turn captions on or off and select a language if more than one is available. In the Controls panel, you can configure captions to appear on by default (i.e., captions will display automatically) or off by default (i.e., the viewer must enable captions manually).
Once captions are enabled, preferences will be saved across all videos viewed on the same domain. For more information on captions, check out our Transcripts and Captions guide.
Volume Control
Hover over the volume icon and drag the white circle up or down to adjust the sound level.
Fullscreen
The Wistia player includes a fullscreen option by default, though you can disable this option in the Controls menu.
Settings Control
The settings button on the Wistia player contains speed and quality controls. Most videos are set to Auto, which will use adaptive streaming to play your videos. However, viewers can manually choose within the settings menu.
Note
Because Internet Explorer 11 cannot consistently support a change in playback speed, the playback speed control will not be visible on this browser version. If a user were to change the playback speed, and then play or pause the video, it would reset to a playback speed of 1.
Controls Visible on Load
With the Controls visible on load setting enabled, all player controls (i.e., play buttons, play bar, volume) will be visible as soon as the video's thumbnail loads.
Wistia Context Menu
Right-clicking on any Wistia video will open the context menu with various options.
About Wistia brings folks to the Wistia website to learn more if they wish.
Report a problem allows viewers to log playback issues that our support team can use for troubleshooting purposes.
Copy Link & Thumbnail is an easy way to grab the link and thumbnail of the video you are watching. Read more about this functionality here.
360 Video
If you’ve uploaded a 360 video, select the This is a 360° video checkbox in the Format controls section of the Controls tab. Refer to our 360 video guide for more information.
Controls on Mobile Devices
Most mobile environments will utilize Wistia’s player controls, though playback may be handed off to the native player of the device in some cases. When using the native player of another device, most customizations made in Wistia panel will not be visible. This primarily occurs when entering fullscreen on iOS devices, or using some older mobile browsers which don’t fully support our modern mobile player.
Troubleshooting
If you notice that some controls are incorrect or missing entirely, you might have some broad on-page styling conflicting with your video embeds. We recommend testing out the fallback embed. It’s a more resilient iframe embed code type that’s not as easily affected by external CSS styling.
Still no luck? Check out our embed troubleshooting guide for more or give us a shout.