How in the Tech

Jump to a Specific Starting Point in a Youtube Video

By Adam Myers ⋅ October 30, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Multimedia

YouTube is probably my number one time waster on the Internet. Whether I’m browsing the site directly or stumble upon a YouTube link on another site, an hour can zip by in no time. It’s a strange addiction but one I’m sure others can relate to. Many external YouTube links I come across are posted in public boards or forums, often with further discussion about the video. Most surfers nowadays are impatient – if only they went through the dial-up age like the rest of us; they want their content and they want it now. I’ve slowly transitioned into this state as well, if a linked video is more than a few minutes long I usually click away from it. Because I’m not alone, it’s not uncommon to see posters say “check out 1m45s in” – that is, fast-forward the video to the 1 minute 45 second mark as that is what I want you to see. Interestingly enough, this behavior has become so common place that YouTube now provides an easy way to directly link to any starting point of their hosted videos.

Here’s an example with one of the top videos on the day of this post, a Chinese Acrobatic Show.

It’s original URL is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azt7sYNByug.

However, I’d really just like to see the incredible balancing act at the 2m58s mark. To indicate the starting point of the video just add #t=XmYs where X is the number of minutes and Y is the number of seconds.  In my example I would append #t=2m58s to the end of the URL.

The modified URL is now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azt7sYNByug#t=2m58s.