Paste YouTube embed

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 ![](url), 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.
• Writes the title into the note. The video title and channel are stored as plain text next to the link, so when the video is taken down the note still says what it was and you can go looking for it elsewhere. The header bar reads from there.
• 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=90 or ?t=1h2m3s starts 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
title: Never Gonna Give You Up
channel: Rick Astley
```

The URL is the only line the plugin needs; the rest is there for you and for grep. Edit or delete it freely — a block with no title: just falls back to looking it up.

If you would rather stay on syntax Obsidian understands on its own, switch Inserted format to Native embed and it writes ![](url) instead. That renders without the plugin installed, at the cost of the title bar and the Shorts handling. The title is still stored, as the embed's alt text: ![Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley](url).

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.
• Fill in missing titles in this note — walks every embed in the note and looks up the ones with no stored title. For notes full of links saved before you installed this.

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 .
Store title in the note	on	Write the title and channel into the markdown, not just the cache.
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 looked-up titles. Titles already written into notes are not touched.

Network use

Two things reach youtube.com: the player iframe itself, and one oEmbed request per video to read its title — and that request only happens when the note does not already carry the title, so an archived note renders without it. 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.

License

MIT