YouTube Time

In this 2nd post about WordPress embeds (here’s the 1st one), I wanted to point out a simple trick that is part of the API for the YouTube embeds. You may not notice anything special about the YouTube video included above, but if you click the play button you will notice that it does not start from the beginning, but at the 15:10 mark of the video instead.

This is accomplished by adding a small piece of extra “code” to the end of the YouTube link. Again, in the instance above we wanted start this 15 minutes and 10 seconds into the video, so we add the following to the standard YouTube link:

&t=15m10s

Show the whole link looks like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&t=15m10s

Again pretty easy. Wes Fryer also pointed me to a site that generates the extra time code for you. It’s available at youtubetime.com. Sure you can type in the code yourself, but laziness is the mother of invention.

Now what if you want to END a YouTube video at a specific time? A little bit of research didn’t lead to any answers using the oEmbed API, but it may be possible that I missed it. What you can use it a site called TubeChop. It will generate code you embed into your posts. Just enter in your YouTube video link and then on the resulting page choose the start and end points for the video. Finally, click the “chop it” button and you’ll see both a link and the embed code for the video. It would look something like this:

The downside to TubeChop appears to be that it generates only a Flash version of the outputted video so it’s a no-go on an iOS device.

So remember when it comes to your WordPress YouTube video embeds, it all in the timing.

This is part 2 of the series of posts on WordPress embeds. Here’s Part 1.

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