YouTube is the most popular video streaming service on the internet. You may have used it to research, watch movies or TV shows, or maybe you have your own YouTube personalities that you want to follow.
What you may not realize is that there are a lot of hidden YouTube URL tricks that you can use to make your YouTube experience more streamlined. In this article, we will cover the 10 most useful URL tricks that you can start using right now.
Table of Contents
1. Start a video at any point
Whenever you put a YouTube video link in the browser, the video will start from the beginning. However, sometimes you’d rather share a specific part of a video than make someone watch the whole thing.
You can do this by editing the YouTube URL with & t = MmSS and replace M with minutes and SS with seconds. The combination of minutes and seconds will mark the point in the video where you want the video to start.
If you just want to start the video under a minute, you can skip the extra minutes like this:
You can also get this link automatically while watching a YouTube video by right clicking on the video and selecting Copy the current video URL.
You can paste this link in a text message, email or social media to share it with others.
2. Skip the Start of a YouTube Video
An alternative to specifying minutes and seconds in a video is to simply skip the beginning of the video by a set number of seconds.
This is useful if you want to skip the long video intro. To do this, just add the starting point after a few seconds. For example, to skip the first 45 seconds of a video, you can simply append & start = 45.
When you press enteryou will notice that the URL automatically changes to the previous format, inserting the start time in seconds.
3. Create an infinite YouTube video loop
On YouTube, there are tons of videos you might enjoy playing in the background. These include videos of the surroundings like a fireplace or rain or even background music. You may want to let videos like this run non-stop while you do other things.
There is an alternative site called YouTubeLoop.net that will take any YouTube URL and play it in a non-stop loop. To do this, simply go to the YouTube video that you want to loop. Edit the URL and replace YouTube.com with YouTubeLoop.net.
For example, if the video URL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VirrGtOwVpE
Replace the URL with this: https://www.youtubeloop.net/watch?v=VirrGtOwVpE
Press enterand the YouTubeLoop.net page will play the YouTube video in an infinite loop.
You can do this normally while watching a YouTube video by right clicking on the video and selecting Ring from the menu.
This will repeat the video forever until you repeat the process and deselect Ring.
4. Autoplay embedded video
If you’re going to share a YouTube video with your friends and want it to play instantly when they open it, there’s another simple YouTube URL trick you can use.
To do this, simply append ? autoplay = 1 at the end of the video URL.
So if the video URL you want to share is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5nIwd9AAzE
You would add autoplay so the link would look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5nIwd9AAzE?autoplay=1
When your friend opens this link, the video will automatically start playing.
Note: In previous years, you used to be able to paste links like this on social media or WordPress and the video would autoplay, however, this feature has been disabled on most platforms because they has been annoying to users for years.
5. Turn off Related Videos
When you embed your own videos that you’ve made on your website, YouTube will usually show relevant videos to your viewers. If you really don’t want to help your competitors get more traffic, you can disable this feature by adding ? rel = 0 at the end of the embed URL.
To get the embed code, select Repost below your YouTube video and copy iframe code.
In WordPress, create a code intercept and paste the iframe code. Connect ? rel = 0 at the end of the YouTube URL.
Now, when visitors watch YouTube videos on your website, they won’t see any related videos at the bottom.
6. Download YouTube Video Thumbnails
If you are writing an article or an article for school and you want to mention a video while embedding thumbnails in the document, there is an easy service that allows you to download thumbnails.
To do this, simply embed the video ID in the following URL:
https://img.youtube.com/en/
Replace
You can download YouTube video thumbnails using the following link:
https://img.youtube.com/en/NMS7OB7WRDY/maxresdefault.jpg
You’ll see the video thumbnail appear as an image on the page.
Just right click on the image and select Save Image As to save it to your computer.
7. Create playlists without YouTube account
You may already be using a YouTube playlist. If you choose Save link below any video, you’ll see the option to save the video to one of your existing playlists or create a new one.
But what if you’ve collected a list of several video IDs and you just want to watch a playlist without actually saving it anywhere? You can do this with a unique YouTube URL trick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=1st_ID,2nd_ID,3rd_ID
Simply insert each video ID you’ve collected into the URL as shown above, separated by commas. You can concatenate as many video IDs as you want. For example, if you have four video IDs, your URL will look like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=ZwD1kG4PI0w,RxINRbE2R8A,Fo_lDTDSO-M,h0Hd3uWKFKY
When you paste this in your browser and press enteryou can watch all videos in order as a quick playlist.
This is a quick and convenient way to watch multiple videos in series without having to stop and click each video when you’re done watching.
8. See only your YouTube subscriptions
If you go to YouTube’s main page like most people do, you’ll see a list of YouTube recommendations for you. Many of these may be unrelated and are nothing that you really care about.
You already have a list of content that you really care about. These are your channel subscriptions. This is one of the simplest YouTube URL tricks that you can bookmark for everyday use. Just jump straight to your subscription by loading YouTube with the subscription feed URL:
https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
This will open YouTube and just show you all your subscriptions and nothing else.
No more irrelevant recommendations, just start watching the things you already know you love.
9. Create GIF from YouTube Videos
Ever wanted to create a GIF that you can share on social media featuring your favorite TV clip or movie scene? You can do this if you find a very short YouTube video with that scene.
You can use a website called gifyoutube.com that allows you to create and edit GIFs based on any YouTube video, as long as you have an ID.
gifs.com/gif/
So if your YouTube video that you want to make GIF from is NO8k8myou just need to append it to the gifs.com URL like so:
This will open the entire gifs.com video in a simple editing tool. First, choose the timeline of the video at which point you want your GIF to start.
Next, select the point in the timeline where you want your GIF to end.
Option Create GIFand go through the quick wizard that will create the GIF for you. In the final step, you’ll see some social-optimized links that you can use or download GIFs to your computer.
It couldn’t be easier to create fun GIFs that you can share wherever you like.
