Auto-show YouTube playlist sidebar on page load

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1

Hey everyone! I’m working on a simple HTML site where I’ve got a YouTube playlist embedded. Right now when the page loads, it just shows the main video player with the first video from my playlist. To see all the other videos in the playlist, visitors have to click that little button in the corner to open up the sidebar.

What I really want is for that video list sidebar to be visible right when the page loads, so people can immediately see all the videos available without having to click anything extra. The whole point of my site is to showcase this collection of videos, so having the full playlist visible from the start would be perfect.

I’ve been digging through all the different iframe parameters you can use with YouTube embeds, but I can’t find anything that controls whether the playlist sidebar shows up automatically. Has anyone figured out a way to make this work? Maybe there’s some parameter I missed or a different approach entirely?

Thanks for any help you can give me!

2

Had this exact problem six months ago building a portfolio site. YouTube’s embed API doesn’t let you force the playlist sidebar to show on load - their interface logic controls it, not embed parameters. I switched to YouTube Data API v3 and built a custom playlist display next to the embedded player. You fetch your playlist videos through the API and create your own sidebar with thumbnails and titles. When someone clicks a video from your list, just update the embed URL to play that video. Takes some JavaScript work but you get complete control over how it looks and works. YouTube Data API docs have solid examples for playlist retrieval. You’ll need an API key but it’s free for normal usage.

3

yep, totally get that! YouTube really limits those options. Even using &listType=playlist&list=YOUR_PLAYLIST_ID doesn’t fix the sidebar issue. I ended up building my own sidebar too after running into this, gives way more control. Hope ya find a solution that works!