How To Embed a YouTube Video Into a Keynote Presentation

Hi this is Gary with MacMost. com. Today let me show you how you can embed a You Tube video inside a Keynote presentation. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 750 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

So a new feature in Mac and iOS Keynote allows you to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos directly into a slide in your presentation. This feature was added to Pages and Numbers earlier this year but it really belongs in Keynote because quite often when you're giving a presentation you want to show a YouTube video inside a presentation on a slide. In the past we've had to switch to our browser, show the video there, and then switch back to the presentation. Now that video can be right in the presentation. You never have to leave it.

So to start make sure you're using the latest version of Keynote, version 10.2 or newer. Let's create a new presentation here. I'm going to use a basic color presentation, something pretty simple. Let's add a new slide. I'll add a blank slide here. Now to put a You Tube video on this slide all we need to do is go to Insert and then Web video. Then here we need to paste in URL of the YouTube or Vimeo video. So let's grab one of my own videos. This is a YouTube video from earlier in the year. All you need to do is grab the URL. So something like this here at the top. YouTube has a variety of different URL's and any of those should work. It's going to be able to figure it out. So I'll copy this and switch back to Keynote and I'm going to paste it in here. You could see it comes up with a Preview. It shows the Thumbnail. It shows the Title and it shows the creator of that video. Then I'll just click Insert and now the video is in there just as a regular element on the slide. I can move it around. I can grab a corner or side and resize it. I can Preview it if I want by clicking Play right here and it will load it up. You can see it looks just like if I took the YouTube code to embed this in a webpage. You get the You Tube logo. You get Settings. You get Close Captioning. You've got Volume controls, playback controls. Things like that. You even have a control here to AirPlay the video. Anything that's like a link by clicking on one of these videos to View or to Share it's going to take you out to the YouTube website.

Now you can do a variety of things with this element here in addition to resizing it. In the Format sidebar here under Web Video I can see that URL here and click it to go to that webpage. I can also click the Replace button and then be able to enter another URL here and replace this with another video. 

The new Title and Caption features are here just like they are for images and shapes. So I can turn these on and then I could add a Title or Add a caption. I could set it to the top or bottom so both the title and caption are at the bottom. So that's optional. You can have that On or Off. The only real video option you've got here is Load Video on Click. So right now if I were to Play this it does nothing until I click and then it will start the video. In fact, if I go to View and then Show Build Order I Could see here it appears in the Build Order just like any animation or transition. It's set to On Click. If I switch to After Transition you could see this checkbox goes Off. So these are basically one and the same. You could set a Delay right here so you could have it start after say a delay of five seconds on this slide.

The Arrange tools are typical for an image but they are really pretty limited for a video. So you could set the size here. If you uncheck Strain Proportions it will seem to work like that but in fact when you play it back it's still going to just fit within that rectangle. You can't rotate it. Another thing about videos is that they don't really work very well with other elements. So, for instance, if I take a shape here and I were to put a rounded rectangle and maybe have it cover a portion of this video if I play it back you could see it does cover it while it's still just showing the thumbnail. But as soon as I start playing you could see that it covers that. If I were to Copy and Paste this into the shape then it doesn't work at all. Actually if I were to group these all together it doesn't work at all. So it really doesn't play nice with other elements. 

But you could still stick things behind it. So I could take this rounded rectangle, for instance, I could send it to the back and I could resize it to create kind of a frame for the video and that will work just fine. On the other hand, you may just want to resize this to basically take up the entire frame of the slide. 

So this will work while you're presenting the slide show. But it doesn't really work very well with other things. Recording a slideshow doesn't seem to be able to capture the YouTube video. When I tried it in Keynote Live it actually worked on the machines that were watching the presentation. But on the presentation machine itself it played the audio but not the video for some reason. So it kinda worked. It doesn't work if you Export as video. It's not going to capture the YouTube video there. It doesn't seem to work when you are recording a slideshow either.

So this definitely seems like it's more for use in a traditional presentation situation. Like at the front of a room or during a meeting. But even so I think this is going to be incredibly useful and will replace the old switch to the browser and then switch back to Keynote method that everybody has been using up until now.