A showreel page that autoplays muted.
One switch here, and the browser rule behind every silent hero on the web.

Two behaviours are worth knowing before you build a page around this. If you tag more than one film as Hero, only the one most in view plays, and the handover happens as the visitor scrolls; two reels never play over each other. And hovering any other card on the page pauses the hero, because the cards themselves run silent previews on hover, then releases it when the pointer moves away.

The switch does nothing on a film that is not tagged Hero, and nothing at all if your Hero film is still set to Hidden or to a private visibility. If the page looks static, those two settings are almost always the reason.

The reasoning is straightforward. Audio that starts by itself is disruptive on a phone in a meeting and hostile on a laptop with fifteen tabs open, so browser vendors converged on a rule: a video may start on its own if it is muted, and it may make sound once the viewer has done something that counts as asking for it. A click on a play button counts. A scroll does not. A page load certainly does not.

The practical consequence for a portfolio is that every autoplaying hero you admire on another filmmaker’s site is muted too. That is not a limitation invented here, and no host can sell you around it. What a host can do is make muted autoplay easy, keep the player clean while it runs, and get out of the way. Our player carries no wordmark, no badge and no watermark on any plan, so an autoplaying hero reads as part of your page rather than as an embed of someone else’s.

Sound is one click away, and that click is worth designing for. A visitor who wants to hear the mix opens the film’s own page, where the player starts paused with its controls in reach. The hero sells the images; the film page delivers the whole thing.

The poster deserves a second look, because it is doing more work than most people credit. It is what a visitor stares at while the file starts arriving, what shows on a connection too slow to play, and what represents the film everywhere the video itself does not render. You can scrub the uploaded master directly and capture a still from it with no re-encode in between: arrow keys move in 0.04 second steps, shift moves a second at a time, and the captured poster is saved as a JPEG up to 1600 px wide. If your browser cannot decode that particular master, the option to upload your own image sits right beside it.

The player here streams the exact bytes you uploaded. Nothing is transcoded on the way in or on the way out, which is the point of the product for a finished film, and it carries a real trade-off for a hero: there is no rendition ladder, so there is no smaller version for the player to fall back to. On a slow line the hero buffers rather than dropping to a lower quality, because a lower quality was never made. That argues for keeping the hero modest and saving the full-bitrate master for the film’s own page, where the visitor pressed play on purpose.

The snippet the dashboard gives you carries no parameters at all:

<iframe src="https://uncompressed.io/embed/VIDEO_ID"
        title="Your film" width="1280" height="720"
        frameborder="0" loading="lazy"
        allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write"
        allowfullscreen
        style="border:0;max-width:100%;aspect-ratio:16/9;height:auto;"></iframe>

For an autoplaying hero, add the parameters to the src and leave everything else alone:https://uncompressed.io/embed/VIDEO_ID?autoplay=1&loop=1&bg=transparent. The allow attribute in the snippet already lists autoplay, which the iframe needs before the browser will let the player start at all.

Two limits to state plainly. Embedding is refused for private, password-protected and vaulted films, and the iframe shows a quiet unavailable card instead, so a hero embed has to be a film you are happy to have play in public. And there is no custom domain here: your profile lives at uncompressed.io/yourname and at yourname.uncompressed.io, and embeds are always served from uncompressed.io. If a domain you own is a requirement, that is the row where this loses, and an embed on your own site is the way around it.

One more, less obvious: if you replaced the film recently, the poster does not follow the new cut. Replacing a video keeps the link, the view count, every embed already on someone else’s site, the privacy setting and the film’s place on your page, and it swaps only the file. The previous cut is deleted rather than archived, so keep your own copy, and repick the poster frame after a real re-edit or your hero will open on a still that no longer exists in the film. The same applies to captions and to any timecoded notes already left on it.

If you are building the page from scratch, video portfolio hosting covers the rest of the page around the hero. For the mechanics of swapping the reel later without breaking a link you already sent, see updating a showreel without changing the link.