How to start or share a YouTube video at a certain time

In this article, you’ll learn how to start or share a YouTube video at a certain time. From humor to information, from entertainment to education, YouTube has done wonders for many people.

But every now and then we’re faced with the dilemma of not wanting to watch the entire thing. Attention spans in the modern digital age are shorter than ever.

Sometimes you want to save time. Other times your friend just doesn’t want to watch the whole thing and you have to save him the trouble of having to scroll to a specific part of the video.

The solution to all of this is to simply share the YouTube video at a timestamp of your choice.

That way, everybody automatically starts watching the video from the point you want. In this article, we’ll be telling you how to do exactly that.

How to start or share a YouTube video at a certain time
Wrap Up

If you’re willing to know how to share a YouTube video at a certain time, please follow the steps below according to the platform you’re using.

On a computer

How to start a YouTube video at a certain time on a personal computer? Fortunately, YouTube has already realized the importance of sharing a video at a certain timestamp.

Hence, they’ve included a built-in feature on the desktop version of YouTube to let it happen.

All you need to do is open up the video you want to share and click on the “Share” button;

How to start or share a YouTube video at a certain time

In the pop-up box, you’ll see sharing options for different platforms. On the bottom right you’ll find what you’re looking for;

By clicking on the checkbox you’ll allow yourself to manually enter any timestamp – within the bounds of the video, of course, for the video to start. Once you click the textbox, the starting time will automatically be changed to the point of the video you are currently on.

This way, you can also simply stop the video on your screen where you want it to start for whoever opens the link and follow the instructions above.

You’ll notice that the link to the YouTube video has now changed, and there’s an indicator in the link of where you want the video to start.

Click on “Copy” to save the link to your clipboard. Wherever you paste the URL once opened, it will start the video at the specified time.

Using a mobile device

Want to know how to share a YouTube video at a specific time from the app? Having this done on your phone is slightly more complicated.

The YouTube app itself on both Android and iOS does not include a built-in feature to choose where to start a video.

Follow the steps below to work your way around this:

Open the browser on your phone. Usual Chrome on an Android phone and Safari on iOS;
Navigate to YouTube using the browser on your phone;
Search the video you want to share and open it;
Load the desktop version of the website. This can be done in different ways, depending on which browser you’re using. Generally speaking, all you need to do is open up the browser’s options menu and find the option to choose the desktop version of the website;
Then, follow the same steps described above as if you were on a PC, starting with the share button.

Manually changing the link

If you’ve been paying attention to what changes when you click on the “Start at” textbox, you’ll know that the magic is in the link to the video. You can make these changes on your own too!

You can manually add the following code at the end of the video’s link: “?t=00m00s“

Replacing the first “00” with a number refers to the minute starting point, and replacing the second “00” with a number refers to the seconds. If a video is shorter than a minute, you can ignore the “00m” part of this code.

Putting all this together, here’s how a typical short YouTube link would be changed:

Before: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ and after, starting at the 42nd second: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?t=42s

For longer videos that go over an hour, you can use the following code too: “?t=00h00m00s“

It’s also worth noting that some links will already have a question mark at the end of the URL. If that’s the case with your particular video, replace the question mark in the above code with an ampersand symbol.

The updated code would then become: “&t=00m00s“

Keep in mind that you can omit the part of this code that’s irrelevant to your purposes – if you just want to start after a few seconds, for instance.

It’s worth noting that using the previous options may be a more efficient way of obtaining the link that starts the video at a certain time. Nevertheless, knowing how to change the link yourself may help to improve your understanding of how these links work for any other reason.

Wrap Up

YouTube has already shown that it is paying attention to the importance of starting a video at a specific time. We can hope that there is an update soon regarding the mobile application on Android and iOS that let us start the YouTube videos at a certain time like the desktop version.

Now that you know how to share a YouTube video at a specific time, you can go straight to the point when sharing some relevant scene with a friend.

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