Suppose you are watching a lengthy video, say nearly of an hour long. You find something very interesting in the course of the video. You would like everyone else to see that moment and decides to share the video. But not everyone will prefer to watch the whole video from the start. In such situations, we can make links to the specific moments of YouTube videos through variety of options.
Create a Start Point While Sharing YouTube Videos
Instead of watching the whole video, Youtube provides multiple options to create an start point for any video. Let us see them in detail.
The simplest way:
The simplest way to copy the YouTube link from any moment is just to pause it there, right click and select “Copy video URL at current time”.
That’s all. Paste the copied URL in emails, social media or anywhere and your video will start from the moment you specified. The secret here is special query string that gets added to normal video link which specifies when should the video start.
Using inbuilt sharing functionality:
If you want to share the video on social sites, you can use the default “Share” button which appears at bottom of every video. There you will find option to start video at specific time. The default time is when you have clicked on share button. You can also edit it in mm:ss or hh:mm:ss format, and the share link will get changed accordingly.
To make this method simple, you can make some changes directly in the link of the video. Add special characters at the end of the link that points to the start time. For e.g. you want the video to start at 1 hour and 30 minutes, add the parameter at the end of the video link which looks like, (YouTube link)?t=1h30m00s. We discovered that you can use anything between ? or & or # to specify the start time. Also either append numbers that YouTube understands as seconds or use the format mm:ss or hh:mm:ss.
When embedding the video:
If you want to embed a video and create a start point, select the ‘Embed’ option from the Share button. It will show the code which you have to copy by default. Click ‘Show more’ for additional options. On the embedded code, you can specify the start point with a different parameter. Instead of adding ?t=, &t= or #t=, you will have to specify ?start=. You will need to mention time in seconds. For example, to create start point at 35min and 29sec, multiply 35 with 60 and add 29 i.e. (35*60) + 29 = 2129. So add ?start=2129 at the end of the code and paste it whereever you want to embed.
Specifying End Time of YouTube Video
Defining a end point is little tricky. Just like we add ?start= we can add ?end= in the URL, but it only takes seconds and works full screen videos. The format for such URL will be https://www.youtube.com/v/[video_id]?start=[start_seconds]&end=[end_seconds] where [video_id] is the unique number each video has, [start_seconds] is the starting time of the video and [end_seconds] is the time where video will automatically end. For example, The video id for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aWIuJGZHGU is 3aWIuJGZHGU. So to watch this video between 30 to 2 minutes, the link will be https://www.youtube.com/v/3aWIuJGZHGU?start=30&end=120. Now to watch a section again and again, you can use tools from our other article on how to play YouTube videos on loop.
Pointing time in YouTube comments
To add a start time in your comment, simply add the time at which you want the video to start. For e.g. if you want comment readers to view scene from 27min and 48sec, simply mention 27:48 in your comment. The time will automatically become a link and when somebody click on it, video will start playing from that specified time.
Use this handy trick while sharing videos that directly starts at the time you want everyone else to watch. The YouTube app on mobile follows these rules of linking to moments and so does the youTube’s mobile site. Wish there was something to specify the end point too. Hat tip to Matt Cutts.
