Space Lightplay

Description

A standard video embed loads a full player — scripts, iframes, trackers — the moment the page opens, even if nobody presses Play. Space Lightplay shows a crisp poster instead and loads the player only when the visitor wants it. Your pages stay fast, and nothing is sent to YouTube or Vimeo before it has to be.

The plugin adds two blocks that work with YouTube (including Shorts), Vimeo (including unlisted videos) and videos from your Media Library.

Space Lightplay — the video block

A poster with a play button that turns into the player on click.

• Open in lightbox — play the video in a full-screen dialog over the page.
• Autoplay when in view — starts muted when the video scrolls into view and pauses when it leaves. Optionally tries to play with sound.
• Start and end time — play just a part of the video. The fields know the video’s length, so values can’t go past its end, and replays keep the same segment.
• End screen — show a call to action, links or the next video when playback ends, built from regular blocks, with an optional Replay button.
• One at a time — starting one video pauses the others on the page.

Space Lightplay Background — the background video block

Like the core Cover block, but it also works with YouTube and Vimeo — Cover only supports self-hosted video.

• Muted, looping, no controls — a clean background behind any blocks you add on top.
• Plays only while in view.
• Optional “poster only” on phones: nothing is loaded on small screens, saving your visitors’ mobile data.
• Overlay colour or gradient with opacity, content alignment, minimum height, padding and text colour — all native editor controls.

Switch freely between blocks

Convert Video ⇄ Background from the block toolbar. Nothing gets lost on the way: settings the other block doesn’t have are kept for converting back, and your content moves with the block. A notice explains what happened and offers Undo.

Core blocks work too: YouTube and Vimeo Embed blocks convert to Space Lightplay and back, and for Media Library videos the Video block ⇄ core Video and the Background block ⇄ core Cover. Settings the core block has no place for (such as the play button design) are not carried over.

Sharp posters, stored on your site

• When you add a YouTube or Vimeo video, its thumbnail is copied into your Media Library in the highest resolution the provider has — including YouTube’s WebP set, which often has an HD frame when the JPEG set doesn’t.
• Low-resolution frames are cropped to remove YouTube’s black bars.
• Prefer your own image? Pick any poster from the Media Library. WordPress serves the right size to every screen, including Retina. Media Library videos without a poster show their first frame.
• The sidebar shows the poster’s size, and explains why if a local copy couldn’t be saved.

Privacy

• Posters come from your own site. Visitors’ browsers contact YouTube or Vimeo only when they are about to play: on hover the connection is warmed up to start faster, and with the consent notice on, nothing is contacted until the visitor agrees.
• Optional “ask before loading” notice per video, with an “Always allow” choice and a link to your privacy policy.
• YouTube plays in privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), Vimeo with do-not-track.

Designed in the editor

Everything is set with WordPress’s own controls — no custom panels to learn.

• Alignments (left, center, right, wide, full), width (on WordPress versions that have the Width control), aspect ratio, border, radius, shadow and margin.
• The aspect ratio is detected from the video and snapped to a standard format (16:9, 9:16, 4:3…).
• Play button: size, radius, icon roundness, background blur and a pulse on hover.
• Colours from your theme palette, with transparency and separate Default/Hover values for the button and icon.
• Hover overlay colour or gradient with its own opacity slider, just like the Cover block’s overlay.

Light by design

• About 7 KB of CSS and JS (gzipped) on the page before anyone presses Play.
• The lightbox and autoplay scripts load only on pages that use them.
• The YouTube or Vimeo player API loads only when it’s needed: an end screen, start/end times, autoplay, or several videos on the page. A single simple video loads just the player.
• Connections to the provider warm up on hover, unless a consent notice is still waiting.

Accessible

• Keyboard-friendly play button with a descriptive label, and an accessible title for every player.
• Visitors who prefer reduced motion get no autoplay.
• The lightbox is a native dialog: Escape closes it and focus returns to the page.
• No video autoplays when the browser asks to save data.