Set (Or Mute) the Initial Volume of a YouTube Embed

Getting a YouTube embed to behave in a certain way during playback can sometimes be difficult, especially when there are no official API parameters to simply include with a YouTube link or embed code. Along these lines, users that have downloaded our plugin have have done so to overcome such complexities and easily make settings like forcing high-definition (HD) playback (now deprecated), adding functional accessibility through title attributes, and so on. YouTube volume initialization had also been one of the more difficult and important settings to our users until now.

Our standard YouTube - WordPress plugin now allows you to easily set an initial volume level for the videos you embed. By default, YouTube remembers and applies the volume of past videos that your visitors have watched. With our feature, you can set a new default volume level. This feature was motivated by a significant number of users that had requested for the ability to automatically mute the videos they embed without requiring their visitors to do it themselves after a video had already started. The most common request was from users that regularly set their embeds to autoplay. They wanted to prevent the audio from starting at an alarming volume level. Another common request was from users that regularly embedded videos containing audio tracks with (annoying) music, noise, and/or speech. They did not want to “force” their visitors to listen to the unwanted audio while watching.

For flexibility, we implemented fine-grained settings. You not only get to choose to mute the YouTube video or use the visitor defaults. You can also set a range of volume percentages in which 0% is a mute setting and 100% is maximum volume. A max volume initialization is not really advised and might be abrasive, unless (maybe) you’re embedding a heavy metal music video that will be appreciated by your visitors. ;-)

All of the above is Free with the plugin. PRO users additionally get per-embed volume initialization control in the PRO version of the wizard.