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April 18, 2026
June 9, 2021
Gutenberg block and Shortcode for embedding YouTube/Vimeo videos, in a way that prevents users easily accessing the underlying video.
This is useful for example when embedding an “unlisted” video as premium course content behind a paywall on your site.
Features include:
Note: This only provides a basic level of protection. Technical users may still be able to access the underlying video.
This plugin is open source and contributions are welcome on GitHub.
[protected_video url="https://youtu.be/aqz-KE-bpKQ" service="youtube"]Embeds YouTube/Vimeo videos on your pages and takes steps to prevent users obtaining the e.g. YouTube URL of the video by clicking on the player or viewing the page source.
Watch this YouTube video for an introduction to the plugin and its potential use cases.
This plugin only provides a basic level of protection against users accessing the default player or otherwise determining the video URL. Technical users may still be able to figure out this information.
Yes, the custom player works on mobile browsers and the disabling of access to the default player is still in place even in fullscreen mode.
The default Plyr player overlays YouTube/Vimeo players with its own controls, which prevents access to the underlying video copy/share buttons under some scenarios, but this is a side-effect of the way it works rather than a feature. The goal of Protected Video is to make this a feature by accounting for more scenarios e.g. when the player is paused, and providing additional features such as obfuscation of the underlying video ID in the HTML.
If you don’t care about your users sharing the video or actually want them to, a plugin like WP YouTube Lyte is probably more suitable.
The main color of the player can be configured at Settings > Protected Video. If you’d like to style the player further, you can provide your own CSS to override the player’s CSS variables:
<style>
:root {
--plyr-badge-background: #000;
--plyr-control-radius: 5px;
}
</style>
<
iframe> if poster removed in Dev Tools
* Fix Vimeo thumbnail in blocks editor
* Bump mini-css-extract-plugin version
* Exclude /demo from Prettier
* Improve WordPress vs standalone player dev experience
* Simplify Demo CI
* Tidy
* Fix lint
* Add missing demo src files
* Build player demo assets with webpack
| Version | Download | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 2.0.4 | Download | Stable |
| 2.0.3 | Download | Stable |
| 2.0.2 | Download | Stable |
| 2.0.1 | Download | Stable |
| 2.0.0 | Download | Stable |
| 1.11.6 | Download | Stable |
| 1.11.5 | Download | Stable |
| 1.11.4 | Download | Stable |
| 1.11.3 | Download | Stable |
| 1.11.2 | Download | Stable |
| 1.11.1 | Download | Stable |
| 1.11.0 | Download | Stable |
| 1.10.10 | Download | Stable |
| 1.10.9 | Download | Stable |
| 1.10.8 | Download | Stable |
| 1.10.7 | Download | Stable |
| Development | Download | Trunk |