Hotspots — Add Video, Audio and Links to Your Pages
Add YouTube and Vimeo videos, audio, links, images and pop-ups directly onto flipbook pages. Covers every hotspot type, shapes, and how video thumbnails work.
Hotspots — Add Video, Audio and Links to Your Pages
Hotspots are interactive regions you place on top of a flipbook page. A reader clicks or taps one and a video plays, a link opens, an audio clip starts, or a pop-up appears — all without leaving the publication.
Hotspots are available on every plan, including the free Explorer tier.
Embedding a YouTube video
This is the most common use, so it's worth doing properly.
Open your publication and go to the hotspot editor.
Go to the page you want the video on.
Draw a region hotspot over the area where the video should appear.
Set the type to Video.
Paste the YouTube URL.
That's it. ZenFlip fetches the video's thumbnail from YouTube automatically and uses it as the hotspot's background, so the reader sees a picture of the video sitting on the page. Clicking it plays the video inline, in an overlay above the flipbook.
You do not need to upload the video, and you do not need to upload captions separately. The video streams from YouTube, and any captions you've added on YouTube come with it, through YouTube's own player controls.
Which URL formats work
All of these are accepted:
Format | Example |
|---|---|
Standard watch link |
|
Short link |
|
Embed link |
|
Shorts |
|
Live |
|
Privacy-enhanced |
|
Full embed code |
|
You can paste YouTube's full embed code — the <iframe> snippet from YouTube's Share → Embed dialog — and ZenFlip will pull the video address out of it for you. Pasting just the plain URL works too, and is simpler.
Vimeo works the same way, with vimeo.com/ID or player.vimeo.com/video/ID. Vimeo does not expose a thumbnail from the URL alone, so a Vimeo hotspot shows a video icon rather than a preview image.
No thumbnail showing? Check these three things
1. Is the hotspot a region, or a pin? Use a region — the rectangular area you draw on the page — sized to where you want the video picture to appear. Only a region is sized and cropped to present a thumbnail properly. A pin is a small circular marker meant to read as a point of interest, so a video picture won't display cleanly on one.
2. Is "Show overlay" switched on? Turning the overlay off hides the thumbnail along with everything else, leaving an invisible clickable area. That's useful when your page artwork already shows the video still, but it means no thumbnail of our own.
3. Is it a YouTube link? Vimeo and uploaded video files have no thumbnail that can be derived from the address. Uploaded files show the first frame of the video instead; Vimeo shows an icon.
Uploading your own video file
If the video isn't on YouTube or Vimeo, upload it directly. ZenFlip plays .mp4, .webm, .ogg and .mov files in a native player, and the first frame is used as the backdrop.
For an uploaded file you can add a caption track, and you should — captions are required for WCAG 2.2 AA conformance, and uploaded files have no captions of their own the way a YouTube video does.
Every hotspot type
Type | What it does |
|---|---|
Link | Opens a URL, or jumps to another page |
Video | YouTube, Vimeo, or an uploaded video file |
Audio | Plays an MP3, OGG, WAV or WebM clip, with optional autoplay and loop |
Image | Opens a larger image in a lightbox |
Text | Shows a text pop-up over the page |
Page jump | Sends the reader straight to another page in the same publication |
Tooltip | A lightweight label on hover or tap |
Embed | Any iframe-friendly web content, such as a Google Form or a map |
Links already in your PDF
If your source PDF contains real hyperlinks — actual clickable links, not just text styled to look like one — they are detected during conversion and turned into Link hotspots automatically. You don't need to redraw them.
Internal links that point to another page of the same document become Table of Contents entries instead.
Shapes and display options
Region — a rectangle you draw. Shows a thumbnail cropped to fit, plus an
optional text label and corner icon. Use this for video.
Pin — a compact circular marker with an icon, for drawing attention to a
point rather than framing a picture.
For each hotspot you can control:
Show overlay — the visible treatment. Off makes the hotspot invisible but
still clickable.
Show icon — the type icon. Turn it off when the thumbnail or your page
artwork should stand alone.
Show text — a label drawn on the hotspot. Regions only.
Accessibility
Every hotspot carries an accessible name built from its label or display text, so screen reader users hear what it does before activating it. Give each hotspot a meaningful label — "Watch the welcome message" rather than leaving it to fall back to "Video hotspot".
If you upload your own video or audio, add a caption or transcript track. For YouTube and Vimeo, add captions on the hosting platform and they travel with the embed.