video_preview

When you paste a video URL into a product image slot in Odoo eCommerce, a live preview appears beside it. That preview is video_preview, and it is one of the thinnest field widgets in core: a component with no logic whose template prints the field's HTML value inside a fixed 16:9 frame, and prints nothing when the value is empty.

The division of labor is the whole story. The widget sits on embed_code, a computed, unsanitized Html field on product.image; the server watches video_url, matches it against known platform patterns, and produces the iframe markup. The widget renders whatever arrives, which is also why it works: the value is trusted server output, never user-typed HTML.

Product videos measurably lift conversion, and the friction in most shops is operational: marketers paste a link, publish, and only later discover the player never rendered. This preview closes that loop at data-entry time, the video plays in the dialog before anyone saves, and the paired warning text says immediately when a URL is not embeddable.

Knowing the platform list is the practical skill. A YouTube or Vimeo link previews instantly; a raw MP4 link or an unsupported host computes an empty embed and will never show, no matter how valid the URL looks. Teams that standardize on a supported platform for product videos skip the whole class of why is the video missing tickets.

Core's usage, in the product media dialog

<field name="video_url"/>
...
<div invisible="video_url in ['', False]">
    <field name="embed_code" widget="video_preview"/>
    <h4 invisible="embed_code">Please enter a valid Video URL.</h4>
</div>

The three-part pattern: the editable URL, the preview on the computed embed, and a warning that shows precisely when the URL produced no embed.

The server side that feeds it

embed_code = fields.Html(compute='_compute_embed_code', sanitize=False)

@api.depends('video_url')
def _compute_embed_code(self):
    for image in self:
        image.embed_code = image.video_url and get_video_embed_code(image.video_url) or False

The platform support everyone asks about is defined in one place: the player_regexes table in Odoo's video embed helper, which in 19 lives in html_editor/tools.py. It matches YouTube in all its URL shapes including shorts and live links, Vimeo including private hash URLs, Dailymotion including short links, Instagram posts and Facebook videos and reels. Anything else, self-hosted files included, fails every regex, and the compute stores an empty value.

Two more source facts round out the picture. The onchange on video_url also tries to fetch a thumbnail and, when the image slot is empty, fills image_1920 with it, so pasting a YouTube link can populate the product image by itself. And the widget file has not changed since its Owl modernization: 16 through 18 differ only in style, and our diff of 19 against the development branch came back empty, byte-identical, making this one of the few widgets with literally nothing to re-verify for Odoo 20 so far.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. We read the widget's file on the public development branch at the time of writing; the branch is unstable and this page will be re-verified after release.

Zero changes: the file is byte-identical to Odoo 19, component, template reference and registration alike. Platform support can still evolve independently through the server-side helper before release.