Embed a Part of a YouTube Video

Friday, October 10, 2008

Embed a Part of a YouTube Video

If you want to embed a YouTube video that starts to become interesting somewhere in the middle, there's a simple way to skip the boring part. YouTube's embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video. Here's how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

For example, the video below includes some excerpts from Google Chrome's launch, but I skipped to the last part, when Sergey Brin answers some interesting questions.

Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't provide an option to link to a part of the video, but you can still use the embedded player:
http://www.youtube.com/v/w8oPEJiCqi4&start=249&autoplay=1,
where the autoplay parameter is necessary to automatically start the video.

Since there's no end parameter, you can try Splicd, a site that uses YouTube's API to isolate a part of a video.

Related:
YouTube embedded player parameters

Labels: YouTube

18 comments ( Post a comment )

Sheldon said on October 10, 2008 1:49 PM PDT:

Once again great tips.

Kid Tech Guru said on October 10, 2008 8:44 PM PDT:

Great tip, but there are also many ways to do this...for example Splicd can help one split a YouTube video too -

http://kidtechguru.blogspot.com/2008/10/splicd-lets-you-split-and-share-any.html

SpamLoco said on October 11, 2008 11:48 AM PDT:

Great trick, very useful.

Matt Cutts said on October 11, 2008 3:16 PM PDT:

Finally! I've been wanting to do this forever on YT since you can do it on Google Video, e.g. http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060721/3605/ tells how to do it with Google Video.

Anonymous said on October 12, 2008 9:06 AM PDT:

Another great way to irritate surfers.

Sentome said on October 13, 2008 2:46 AM PDT:

Wonderful Job thx

Social Media Marketing Blog said on October 16, 2008 8:20 PM PDT:

wow, great tip buddy i loved it.

myjavanotebook said on October 26, 2008 5:56 AM PDT:

Is it possible to add a stop time after the start? I would like to play only a small part of the video.

Anonymous said on December 17, 2008 12:56 PM PDT:

This was exactly what I was looking for! Well explained and referenced. Kudos

Jaakko H. said on March 24, 2009 3:35 PM PDT:

I think you've covered this in a later post but in any case maybe you could update this post, too.

That is, to note that YouTube actually _does_ enable people to "deep link" directly to a specific spot in a video. Just add #t=XmYs where X is the number of minutes and Y the number of seconds you want to jump to. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPQViNNOAkw#t=12m40s for an example (Clay Shirky explaining the beauty of The Long Tail).

macmill said on July 9, 2009 11:04 PM PDT:

Just make height= something smaller. I'm not sure the exact height for YouTube's controller. Experiment. It's probably around 30.

Martí said on August 22, 2009 11:11 AM PDT:

You can actually link to a specific moment of the video by adding this to the end of the URL
#t=0m56s

Goemon 2009 said on September 13, 2009 5:32 PM PDT:

It works on me,..
Thanks!

stop dreaming start action said on September 13, 2009 5:38 PM PDT:

i found somemagic tool if embeding disable on http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2009/02/youtube-embed-magic-tool.html, is thath true?

Anonymous said on September 30, 2009 10:12 AM PDT:

can anyone tell if i want to embed a youtube video directy by its url..... it is something like "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNGlf3hUyMY&feature=channel"............ now if i replace the src with this url, it dosnt work........ any one has idea?? plz help!!!

Anonymous said on September 30, 2009 10:33 AM PDT:

@Anonymous:

Use http://www.youtube.com/v/BNGlf3hUyMY

Anonymous said on October 7, 2009 4:27 AM PDT:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8oPEJiCqi4#t=4m09s

Here's the link construction to take you to the same start point you've set using the embed code.

What do you think?