Tell HN: You can link to segment of a YouTube video with stop time query string

4 points

3 years ago

This began as an Ask HN (after much Googling), but now I’ve found the answer and thought I'd share it. Here are seven seconds of a Joel Spolsky talk:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0nbkaYsR94c?start=41&end=48

1. Use the embed URL (https://youtube.com/embed/ID) rather than the watch URL (https://youtube.com/watch?v=ID or https://youtube.com/watch/ID)

2. Specify the start time, end time, or both, using the url parameters "start" and "end". The units are seconds. I haven't figured out a way to use other units but it might be possible.

I’d run across mention of YouTube allowing one to link to a segment of a video using ?start=30&end=60 (or in some cases "stop" rather than "end") in various articles, but these parameters don’t work on the watch URL. When sharing a regular YouTube link, start=30 turns into t=30s and the stop or end parameter gets thrown out. I assumed YouTube had removed this useful functionality — but the docs for the embedded player (https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters?csw=1#end) still mentioned the end parameter, so I tried using them on the embed URL when not embedded, and it worked.

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