Reporting & research on Shopify and ecommerce
A look at what Dawn's video section actually contains, twelve settings in total, and why the answer to autoplay is not in that file but in a different theme entirely.
Most merchants who search for a Shopify video section assume Dawn’s built-in one will autoplay a clip the way a social feed does, and then spend an afternoon looking for a checkbox that is not there. Dawn’s sections/video.liquid has 12 settings as measured in commit 258f00f from August 10, 2026, and none of them starts playback automatically. The setting a merchant wants exists, just not in this file, and not even in this theme. Getting that straight before editing theme code saves the afternoon.
The file is called sections/video.liquid and its schema name is t:sections.video.name. Among its 12 settings are heading, typed as inline_richtext, and heading_size, a select with 5 options for how large that heading renders. There is enable_video_looping, a checkbox, which is the closest thing to a playback control this file offers. Below that sits a paragraph-type setting used purely as a label in the theme editor, then video, a native video field, and video_url, which accepts a hosted URL as an alternative. That is the shape of the section: a heading, a size choice, a loop toggle, and two ways to attach footage. Autoplay is not among the 12, and this is not a gap in documentation, it is what the commit contains.
Autoplay shows up in Horizon, a separate theme, inside blocks/video.liquid, measured at commit 8b42ace from August 31, 2026. That block carries 19 settings, nearly double Dawn’s video section, and two of them are video_autoplay and video_loop, both checkboxes. The same file has source as a select between 2 options, a video field, a video_url field, and cover_image as an image picker for the frame shown before playback starts. Horizon repeats the autoplay and loop checkboxes in a second file, blocks/_media-without-appearance.liquid, which has 8 settings total including media_type as a select and image as an image picker. So a merchant who wants autoplay is choosing a theme family, not just toggling a switch inside Dawn.
Merchants often want a video sitting next to text in a fixed grid, and Dawn’s video section cannot do that because it has no layout setting among its 12. The section built for that job is sections/collage.liquid, with 8 settings, 4 block types, and a hard maximum of 3 blocks per section. It has desktop_layout and mobile_layout as two separate selects, each with 2 options, plus card_styles, another 2-option select, and color_scheme as a color_scheme field. None of this touches autoplay either. It solves arrangement, Dawn’s video section solves a single embedded clip with a heading above it.
| File | Theme | Commit | Settings | Block types | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sections/video.liquid | Dawn | 258f00f | 12 | — | No autoplay setting present |
| sections/collage.liquid | Dawn | 258f00f | 8 | 4 (max 3 blocks) | Layout controls, no video-specific autoplay |
| sections/hero.liquid | Horizon | 8b42ace | 36 | 8 | Two media slots, each image or video |
| sections/_blocks.liquid | Horizon | 8b42ace | 28 | 3 | Layout and alignment, not video-specific |
| blocks/video.liquid | Horizon | 8b42ace | 19 | — | Has video_autoplay and video_loop checkboxes |
| blocks/_media-without-appearance.liquid | Horizon | 8b42ace | 8 | — | Also has video_autoplay and video_loop |
The pattern across the table is that setting counts do not track with autoplay availability in any simple way. Horizon’s _blocks.liquid has 28 settings and no autoplay checkbox at all, because it governs direction and alignment through settings like content_direction, a 2-option select, and vertical_alignment, a 3-option select, not media playback.
Across the market tracked by themescout.co, 329 themes are listed in a snapshot dated August 26, 2026 — the aggregator has served identical figures on every check since, so treat these as an August reading rather than a live count. In that snapshot the median price is $300 inside a $100 to $500 range, and the median rating is 4.53 out of 5 spread across 308 rated themes with a median review count of 23. Categories in this dataset span Art, Auto, Bags, Beauty, Clothing, Electronics, Food and drink, Home, Jewelry & Access., Kids, Pets, Sports, and Toys, though no category matching a video-section feature name exists in these measurements, only theme-level category tags. UTD’s themes appear inside this same general ranking, and a merchant curious where they land can browse UTD’s storefront listing directly rather than take a claim about video features on faith. On the performance side, CrUX field data for July 2026 shows a mobile median of 85.5% of stores passing all Core Web Vitals across 247 themes with sufficient data, ranging from 46.1% to 98.6%, and a desktop median of 86.2% across 199 themes, ranging from 30.3% to 99.2%. This is real visitor traffic, not a lab run, but it is not broken down by which video settings a theme exposes, so it belongs here as context and nothing more.
Read Dawn’s sections/video.liquid for what it is, a heading, a size choice, a loop toggle and a video field, and stop looking inside it for autoplay because the 12 settings measured in commit 258f00f do not contain one. If autoplay matters for the storefront, check Horizon’s blocks/video.liquid and its 19 settings, or budget for custom code against Dawn, since the market’s median theme price of $300 already assumes most buyers accept some editing beyond the box.
No. The 12 settings in sections/video.liquid, as measured in commit 258f00f from August 10, 2026, are heading, heading_size, enable_video_looping, video, a paragraph label, video_url, and six others, and none of them is an autoplay checkbox. Looping is present through enable_video_looping but starting playback automatically is not a control this file exposes. If a merchant needs autoplay on a video block, the setting exists in a different theme's codebase, not in Dawn's video section as measured here.
Horizon's blocks/video.liquid, measured at commit 8b42ace from August 31, 2026, has 19 settings and includes video_autoplay as a checkbox alongside video_loop, also a checkbox. That same file also carries source as a two-option select, a video field, a video_url field, and a cover_image image picker. Horizon's blocks/_media-without-appearance.liquid, with 8 settings in the same commit, repeats video_loop and video_autoplay as checkboxes next to a media_type select and an image picker.
The heading_size setting is a select with 5 options, which affects the text above the video, but the 12 settings measured in sections/video.liquid do not include a layout or width control for the video itself. Merchants who want a video next to text in a fixed layout should look at Dawn's sections/collage.liquid instead, which carries 8 settings, 4 block types and a maximum of 3 blocks, including desktop_layout and mobile_layout as separate two-option selects.
Horizon's sections/hero.liquid, at commit 8b42ace from August 31, 2026, has 36 settings and 8 block types, and it lets a merchant pick media_type_1 or media_type_2 as a select between image and video, each with its own image_picker and video field. That is three times the setting count of Dawn's video section, which sits at 12, though Dawn and Horizon are built for different layout jobs and the comparison is about setting count, not quality.
The Core Web Vitals figures in this dataset come from CrUX for July 2026, meaning real visitor traffic rather than a lab run, and they are not broken down by whether a theme's video section autoplays. On mobile the market median for stores passing all Core Web Vitals is 85.5% across 247 themes, ranging from 46.1% at the worst to 98.6% at the best, and on desktop the median is 86.2% across 199 themes, ranging from 30.3% to 99.2%. Whether a specific video setting like autoplay moves those numbers is not something this dataset isolates.