How to share a Youtube video at a specific point in time

As a person who loves to watch different content on the famous video sharing platform everyone is familiar with, Youtube, sometimes I do like to share stuff with my own friends. Most of the time it happens that I want to show them a particular fragment of the video, not the entire media.


Copying the link as it is by default and sending it online can work, but such thing is very unpractical for us who love to spend a lot of time researching stuff on the Internet for the purpose of getting knowledge.

Time is money they say. I do say time is priceless. With such thing in mind, I decided to share a simple trick which not many on the non technical side are aware. The simple hack is very useful when someone wants to share a video at a specific point of the playback.

First let's analyse the url of a Youtube video. The purpose of the analysis is to explain to everyone the composition of the url, not a research on how the video platform sharing giant designs its own urls.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I am taking a Youtube video from on of my favorite movies which has been released lately, Home.

The following is the url.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tt0cuTQvvk

Let's split the above url in its smaller components from which it is being composed.

https is an internet protocol, youtube.com is the domain, watch is the verb and v is a parameter

What is to our interest is the parameters as a new one of them is needed for the purpose of accomplishing our task. The v parameter is given a certain value id which Youtube uses to match a specific video. It stands for video I think.

v=_tt0cuTQvvk

The parameter which we need is the t parameter. It stands for time. To make things more concrete I am showing the following.

t = 1m1s

The above piece of code can be used in a Youtube video url to target a specific frame on the media content like shown below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tt0cuTQvvk&t=1m1s

When pasting the above url into the browser the video starts to play on 1:01. Very simple to understand, m stands for minute and s stands for seconds. To make stuff more concrete, take a look at the following screenshot which shows the above code in action.

In case the video is really long, as an addicted Youtuber that you are are, you can use the following code.

t = 1h2m1s where h stands for hour

As you guys can see it is really easy, not technical at all.