Month: January 2011

Set a Custom Starting Point for a YouTube Video

I’ve been embedding videos from a variety of services into web pages for several years now. At the most basic, these services will allow you to embed a smaller version of the parent video. YouTube gives you the ability to adjust the display size and video player color scheme as well as some other interface options. Hulu is unique (as far as I know) in providing users with an easy-to-use custom clipping interface, allowing you to embed only a part of a selected video. I’ve gotten so comfortable with that feature that I’ve been hoping YouTube would introduce something similar.

Well, there’s good news. It’s not as slick as Hulu, but YouTube does provide some options on their embedded player. Most importantly there’s an option to specify a custom starting point for any embedded video. Here’s the parameter:

start

You can use this parameter by adding it to the source URLs in the provided embed code. For example, if I wanted to start my embedded video at the 1:12 mark, the YouTube embed code would look like this:


<object width="656" height="517"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/tqXJzZ_T8kg?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0&amp;start=72"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/tqXJzZ_T8kg?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0&amp;start=72" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="656" height="517"></embed></object>

And the result will be the following:

You’re welcome!