How to embed a video in Google Forms

Last updated September 2026 · ~7 minute read

Short answer: click Add Video, pick a YouTube video, click Select. Two things surprise people. Google takes YouTube and nothing else — there is no MP4 upload. And a video is its own item, not something you hang on a question: Google's help page says plainly, “You can't add videos to questions, but you can place them before or after a question.” Which also means you cannot make watching it required.

That one constraint shapes everything else on this page — how you lay out a watch-then-answer quiz, why there is no “must watch” setting, and why the honest workaround is a question rather than a toggle.

Add a video to a form

Google's steps, from its own help page, are three lines long:

1. In Google Forms, open a form.
2. To add a video, click Add Video — the icon in the floating toolbar beside the form.
3. Choose your video and click Select.

Two things worth adding. First, the new item lands below whichever item is selected, so click the question it should follow before you click Add Video — otherwise it goes to the bottom and you drag it back. Second, there is a keyboard shortcut: hold Ctrl and press i then v (⌘ then i then v on a Mac). Both the image and video inserts have one — i then p is an image, and i then b is a section break, which is often the item you actually wanted.

Once inserted, give the item a title and a caption. A bare video thumbnail floating between two questions reads as an accident; one line of “Watch this before question 4” does the job.

A video is an item, not a question

This is the sentence to remember, verbatim from Google's Edit your form page:

“You can add an image or YouTube video to your form. You can't add videos to questions, but you can place them before or after a question.”

Compare that with the line directly above it, which says you can add an image “to a question or an answer for multiple choice or checkbox questions”. Images have three homes; a video has one. It sits in the flow of the form as a block of content, the same way a title-and-description item or a section header does — see adding an image to Google Forms for the three-places-an-image-can-live version of this.

Everything awkward about video in Forms follows from that single fact:

• No answer options carry a video. You cannot build “pick which of these four clips is correct” with four embedded players. You can build it with four images and a video above the question.
• Order is your only binding. Nothing links the video to the question that follows it except the fact that it comes first. If someone reorders items later, the pairing quietly breaks.
• A section break is the sturdier grouping. Put the video and its question in their own section and the pair travels together, with a page break keeping the question off screen until the respondent moves on.

You cannot require someone to watch it

Teachers ask this constantly, and the answer is no — not partly, not with a setting buried somewhere. Here is the reasoning, which is worth more than the answer.

Required is a property of a question: it is the toggle that stops the form submitting until that question has an answer. A video is not a question — Google's own sentence says so — so there is no Required switch on it, nothing for the switch to validate, and nothing recorded in the response about whether the video was played, paused after four seconds, or ignored entirely. The response row has one column per question, and your video is not one.

The honest workaround, and the one every teacher lands on eventually: ask a question only someone who watched can answer.

1. Insert the video as its own item.
2. Immediately after it, add a short-answer question — “What word appears on the whiteboard at 3:40?” or “Which two examples does she give for the third rule?”
3. Mark that question required.
4. If the form is a quiz, put the answer in the answer key so it is graded automatically. Our quiz guide covers answer keys and points.

Pick a detail from the middle of the clip rather than the first thirty seconds, and the checkpoint does real work. It is not proof of watching — nothing in Forms is — but it is proof of having seen the thing you cared about, which was the actual goal.

YouTube or nothing

Google documents exactly one source: “You can add an image or YouTube video to your form.” No file upload, no Google Drive video, no Vimeo, no MP4 dragged onto the page. If your video is a file on your laptop, the route is unchanged from a decade ago — upload it to YouTube, set it to Unlisted if it should not be public, and add it by its link. Unlisted videos embed and play for anyone with the form.

Two consequences that catch people out:

• A private video shows an error, not a player. Unlisted is fine; Private is not. If the clip lives on a school or work YouTube account with restricted sharing, test the form while signed out before sending it.
• Google documents no sizing, cropping or alignment control for a video, and no start or end trim points. The help page stops at “click Select”. If you need a specific segment, publish a trimmed version on YouTube rather than hunting for a setting that is not documented.

One more limit from the same page: a form holds “up to 300 pieces of content, like questions, descriptions, images, and videos”. Videos count. A media-heavy course form gets there faster than you would expect.

The one place a video does attach to a question

There is a genuine exception, and it is not in the editor's toolbar — it is in quiz grading. On a quiz question's answer key, Google documents: “To add a written or YouTube video explanation to an answer, click Add answer feedback.” So a clip can be bound to a specific question after all, as the explanation a respondent sees once they have answered. A wrong answer to question 6 can hand back the two minutes of video that explain question 6. That is closer to “watch this” than anything in the form body, because it arrives exactly when the learner has demonstrated they need it.

Doing it from a phone

The steps above assume the desktop web editor. Forms+ keeps the same item in the edit toolbar on iPhone and iPad: Add video opens a YouTube search inside the app, and picking a result inserts it into your real Google Form on your own account. The item gets the same title and caption fields as any other block, and answer feedback in the quiz editor takes a video too.

Which approach do you want?

Frequently asked questions

Can you add a video to a question in Google Forms?

No. Google's help page is explicit: “You can't add videos to questions, but you can place them before or after a question.” A video is its own item in the form, sitting above or below the question it relates to. Images are different — those can be attached to a question or to an answer option.

Can you upload an MP4 to a Google Form?

No. Google documents one source only: “You can add an image or YouTube video to your form.” There is no file picker for video and no Drive option, so an MP4 has to be uploaded to YouTube first — unlisted is enough — and then added by its link.

Can you make a video required in Google Forms?

No. Required is a property of a question, and a video is not a question, so there is no Required switch on it and nothing in the response about whether it played. The workaround is to follow the video with a required question only someone who watched it can answer.

Do videos count towards the Google Forms 300 item limit?

Yes. Google states you can add and edit “up to 300 pieces of content, like questions, descriptions, images, and videos”. Every video you insert is one of those 300.