Some Handy YouTube Tricks

by Curtiss   |   last updated July 29, 2010   |   Web Tutorials ·

I’m sure there have been times when you’ve wanted to link to a particular part of a YouTube video but, if you’re anything like me, you had no idea how to go about doing so. Well, you have two options:

1. You can link to the video on YouTube and specify the minute and second at which you want the video to start playing.
2. You can embed the video and specify the second at which you would like the video to start playing.

Linking to YouTube

To link to the video on YouTube and specify a starting point, you need to add a URL hash at the end of the link with the minutes and seconds specified. The link might look something like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWhalXA7z2I#t=02m55s

The link above will lead to the 2:55 mark in that particular video. All you need to do is add “#t=” to the end of the URL, then specify the minutes in two digits, followed by the letter “m” (for minutes), followed by the seconds (two digits), followed by the letter “s” (for seconds).

Unfortunately, at this time, this feature seems to be a little spotty and unreliable, especially when trying to watch the video with YouTube’s HTML5 player. However, it can be a pretty handy little tip for the right situations.

You can try it out in your own browser and see if it works for you.

Starting an Embedded Video at a Specific Point

To embed a video and have it start playing at a specific point in the video, you need to take a slightly different approach, but it’s still just as simple. Instead of using the URL hash with minutes and seconds specified, you will simply add a “start” parameter to the end of the embed URL and provide the starting point in seconds. Therefore, if I were to embed the video shown above, I would use code similar to the following:

<object width="640" height="385">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EWhalXA7z2I&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=175"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EWhalXA7z2I&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=175" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed>
</object>

Notice the &start=175 at the end of the param name="movie" URL and the end of the embed source URL. That tells YouTube to start playing the video at the 175 second mark (which is 2 minutes and 55 seconds for those with poor math skills).

The embedded video should then act something like the following video (if WordPress doesn’t butcher my embed code):

Credits

I found these two tips in the following locations. Thanks to those authors for providing this information.

• Link to a specific part of a YouTube video – Matt Cutts’ Blog
• YouTube Allows You to Start Playing Embed Video at Specific Start Time – My Digital Life

As you can see from the date stamps on both blog entries, neither of these are new YouTube features, but I suspect they will still be new to many of us users.