Paste YouTube embed
Maximiliano Burgos3 downloadsTurns a pasted YouTube link into an inline player with the video title, right where you paste it.
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates2
Paste a YouTube link into a note and get a player where the link would have gone — no dialog, no extra command, no leaving the keyboard.
Obsidian can already embed YouTube with , but you have to write that syntax yourself and the result is a bare iframe. This plugin does the conversion at paste time and renders a card with the video title, so a link you dropped into a note six months ago still tells you what it is.
What it does
- Converts on paste. Paste a bare YouTube URL on its own, with no text selected, and it becomes a player block. Paste with text selected, or paste anything else, and nothing changes.
- Shows the video title. The header bar carries the real title and channel, fetched once through YouTube's oEmbed endpoint and then cached in the vault.
- Handles the whole URL family.
youtube.com/watch,youtu.be,shorts,live,embed,m.youtube.com,music.youtube.com, and playlists. - Keeps timestamps. A link with
?t=90or?t=1h2m3sstarts the player at that point. - Renders Shorts vertically, in a 9:16 card sized for them, instead of stretching them into a 16:9 box.
- Stays out of the way otherwise. The player is a plain fenced block holding the original URL, so the note is still readable and greppable without the plugin.
What it writes to your note
```youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
```
If you would rather stay on syntax Obsidian understands on its own, switch Inserted format to Native embed and it writes  instead. That renders without the plugin installed, at the cost of the title bar and the Shorts handling.
Commands
- Insert embed from clipboard — for when the link is already copied.
- Convert link on current line to embed — turns a link you pasted earlier into a player.
Settings
| Setting | Default | |
|---|---|---|
| Convert on paste | on | Paste a YouTube link and get the player. Turn it off to keep plain links and use the commands instead. |
| Inserted format | Code block | Code block, or native . |
| Show video title | on | Header bar with the title and channel. |
| Privacy mode | off | Play from youtube-nocookie.com. |
| Keep timestamp | on | Honour ?t= from the pasted link. |
| Title cache | — | Clear the stored titles. |
Network use
Two things reach youtube.com: the player iframe itself, and one oEmbed request per video to read its title. Turn off Show video title to stop the second one; turn on Privacy mode to serve the player from youtube-nocookie.com.
Clipboard use
Two paths touch the clipboard, both only in response to something you did:
- Converting on paste reads the text of the paste event you just triggered. It never polls the clipboard on its own, and anything that is not a bare YouTube URL falls straight through to Obsidian's normal paste handling.
- Insert embed from clipboard reads the clipboard when you run that command, and ignores its contents unless they are a YouTube link.
Nothing from the clipboard is stored or sent anywhere. The only thing written to disk is the video title, cached in the plugin's data.json, which you can clear from the settings.
Installation
From Obsidian — Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for "Paste YouTube embed".
Manually — download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/youtube-paste-embed/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.
Development
There is no build step. main.js is the source: plain CommonJS against the Obsidian API. Edit it, reload Obsidian, done.