Video Won't Play or Track

A video shows a black screen, won't load in the learner view, or plays but never saves progress. These are almost always hosting or URL configuration issues — here's the checklist.

The golden rule: use the native player

Progress tracking, "must watch before proceeding" enforcement, and completion records all come from LecturePanda's own player. You get them by adding the video as a Video element in Materials using its Vimeo or YouTube URL.

A video pasted in as an iframe embed code plays through the outside platform instead — fine for supplementary material, but watch data stays with that platform, so the Required setting has nothing to measure against. Whenever a video needs to count toward completion or CE credit, host it on Vimeo or YouTube and add it as a Video element with its URL. That single change is usually all it takes to turn tracking on.

YouTube-hosted videos

Use the full watch URL

Always add YouTube videos with the full URL:

• ✅ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• ❌ https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID (the shortened "Share" link)

The shortened youtu.be form can render as a black screen with no controls in the learner view — even though it may look fine in the build view. To get the full URL, open the video on YouTube and copy the address from the browser bar.

Check the video's embed settings

If a YouTube video plays but progress never saves, check the video's settings in YouTube Studio (Details → Show more):

1. Allow embedding — must be checked. This is the most common culprit, and it can be off by default.
2. Visibility — must be Public or Unlisted. Private videos won't play through the course page at all.
3. Audience — must be "No, it's not made for kids." YouTube strips embed features from kids-flagged videos, which breaks tracking.

Settings are per-video, not account-wide

Fixing one video does not fix the others. If you bulk-uploaded a course's worth of videos, check every one. To avoid this in the future, set the correct defaults under YouTube Studio → Settings → Upload defaults.

Vimeo-hosted videos

Vimeo videos have the same per-video requirement: the video's privacy/embed settings must allow it to be embedded on other sites. If a newly uploaded Vimeo video won't load in the course preview, check its embed permissions in Vimeo first.

Two Vimeo settings account for most of these:

• Where can this be embedded? Set to "Anywhere", or add your LecturePanda domain to the specific-domains list. Domain-restricted embedding is the stronger option — it keeps the video off search engines and off other people's sites — but it's a paid Vimeo feature, and forgetting to list the LecturePanda domain blocks your own course.
• Privacy. Unlisted works fine. Fully private videos can't be embedded.

If you're worried about people saving your recordings, Vimeo's download control is the setting to turn off, and it's independent of the embed rules.

Videos that only work on the office network

If learners can play a recording at work but not at home, the video is almost certainly hosted somewhere internal — SharePoint, MS Stream, a network share — that requires the corporate network or a VPN.

LecturePanda doesn't restrict where learners watch from, so nothing on our side will fix it. Either move the recordings to Vimeo, which works from anywhere and is what most organizations end up doing, or ask your IT team to open external access on the internal platform.

Replacing a video? Edit the URL — don't delete and re-add

To swap in a new version of a video, edit the URL on the existing video entry in Materials. Deleting the entry and adding a new one creates a new video record and wipes progress for every learner already partway through it.

Recording not visible to participants at all

If participants can't see or play a recording that works for you as an admin, check it as a participant first: open the course link not signed in as an admin, and confirm the video displays and has audio. An admin preview can succeed where a participant view fails, so this tells you which side the problem is on.

If it fails there too, the usual causes are the embed settings above, or Access on the Materials tab being set to Restricted Access — which makes materials unavailable until the learner has registered and paid. That's working as intended; check the person reporting it has actually finished registering.

Supplemental videos: link them, don't add them in-flow

If your main video tells learners to pause and watch supplemental material, add those supplemental videos as links in an Instructions section at the top of the course, with a short description of each — not as extra video steps in the main module flow.

In-flow supplementals force learners to navigate back and forth with the arrow buttons, which is easy to get lost in. A link opens in a new tab; the learner watches it and returns to the main video exactly where they left off.

Still stuck?

If you've verified the URL format and the hosting settings, and playback or tracking still fails, contact support with the course link and the video URL — we'll investigate from the platform side.