This is the sixth post in my series about a sample Marketing Intranet site. In this post we are going to be adding a Marketing video to the home page using the Media Web Part. This web part comes out of the box with SharePoint and can be used to display media files on any web part page. There are several configurations you can make that will allow you to customize how the video is displayed.
In our example we just want to display the most recent marketing campaign video on the Intranet site. Whenever the page loads we want the video to start to play. We can do this by adding the Media Web Part to the home page of our Intranet site.
Once the web part is added to the page, we will edit the web part properties to configure our video.
Once we click the option to configure the Ribbon will display the various configuration options available to us:
Here is a breakdown of the various options we can configure:
| Option | Description | Example |
| Change Media | When selected the file will you choose will be uploaded to SharePoint and then configured to play in the web part. | When you want to select the media file to be displayed or you want to change the existing video to a new video. |
| Change Image | This image is the preview image that is displayed in the web part prior to the video playing. This is what the web part will display if the video does not start automatically. | Use this option to select or change the preview image for the web part. |
| Title | Sets the Web Part Title (visible in Chrome). | If you want to have a custom title. In most cases you would set this to something other than Media Web Part. |
| Start Media Automatically | Plays the media on page load. | If you want the media to auto play you would select this, otherwise it users will have to push “play” in the web part for the media to start. |
| Loop Until Stopped | Keeps the media playing on a continual loop until the user stops in within the web part. | If you want the media to keep looping you would use this option. Be careful on this one because you don’t want to annoy your site visitors. |
| Styles | Sets the color scheme for the media. | This is the strip above and below the media file on the page. You have two options, Dark and Light. |
| Size | Sets the height and width of the web part. | You can configure the horizontal and vertical width of the web part. You can also elect to use the Lock Aspect Ratio option to ensure that the height and width are expanded or shrunk at the same scale. This should keep your media file from displaying distorted. |
For my example Intranet site I have the media web part displayed in the top right corner of the page. I have it configured to play automatically but not to loop. This means it will play when users first hit the page but it won’t keep looping. I figure they really only need to see it once. Each quarter when we have a new media message we will update the home page. This will be a good way to get people coming back to the site because they will want to see the new quarterly marking message. Here is a screenshot of my home page.
Something to Consider
Not all file types are supported in the Media Player web part. To see a list of what is supported, check out these links.
The most common asked out file format that isn’t supported seems to be flash. If you have a flash video that you want to display on the page, here are some links for some alternate options:
Jennifer Ann Mason 