This article explains how to add YouTube videos to your Online Courses so they play reliably for all Learners, including those using the Absorb Learning Mobile App. The key requirement is the URL format: YouTube content must be linked using YouTube's embed URL. This guidance is intended for Administrators who build course content, and it is also useful when troubleshooting reports that a YouTube video will not play on mobile devices or in certain browsers.

Use the Embed URL Format

When you link YouTube content in Absorb, the URL format you choose determines whether the video will play for every Learner. Always use YouTube's embed URL format. The standard share and watch URLs are blocked whenever Absorb displays the video inside an iframe.

YouTube does not allow its standard watch pages to load inside an iframe. Whenever Absorb renders a linked video in an iframe, such as an Object Learning Object set to Launch in a modal (iFrame), a watch?v= or youtu.be URL is blocked and the video will not play. The embed URL is YouTube's iframe-ready player, so it displays correctly in these contexts.

Symptoms of an Unsupported URL

If a YouTube lesson uses the watch?v= or youtu.be format, the video may fail to load in the Absorb Learning Mobile App and in desktop Safari. Learners typically see a blank player or a message that the content is blocked, rather than the video. Because the same lesson may still play in other desktop browsers such as Google Chrome, the problem can be difficult to diagnose: an Administrator testing in Chrome may not reproduce what Learners experience on mobile devices or in Safari. Switching to the embed URL allows the video to play consistently across the mobile app and desktop browsers.

How to Get the Embed URL

You can obtain the embed URL in two ways: copy it directly from YouTube, or convert a standard link yourself. Both methods produce the same result.

Copy the Embed URL From YouTube

This method uses YouTube's built-in embed option to provide the exact URL that Absorb needs.

1. Open the video on YouTube.
2. Click Share below the video.
3. In the Share window, click Embed. YouTube displays the embed code as an iframe snippet.
4. In the embed code, locate the src attribute and copy only the web address inside the quotation marks. It begins with https://www.youtube.com/embed/.

Convert the URL Manually

If you already have a standard YouTube link, you can convert it without opening the embed menu.

1. Start with your standard link, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID.
2. Replace watch?v= with embed/ so the link reads https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID.
3. For a youtu.be share link such as https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID, take the VIDEO_ID that appears after youtu.be/ and add it to https://www.youtube.com/embed/ to form https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID.

Add the Embed URL to Your Course

To make a YouTube video available in an Online Course, link to it using an Object Learning Object and enter the embed URL as the source URL. When the Object Learning Object is set to Launch in a modal (iFrame), Absorb renders the video inside an iframe, so the embed URL is required for the video to play in the Absorb Learning Mobile App and in Desktop Safari. For the full procedure to add and configure a Learning Object, see the An Introduction to Learning Objects article. 

For details specific to video content and supported sources, see the Add a Video Learning Object article.