118. YOUTUBE Video Tricks

Youtube is a Google owned vast Video sharing site which has plenty of high quality and informative videos in it.

Here are some of the tricks which can be used on youtube videos of that particular video url for the desired kind of the result as mentioned with the trick.

1) View high quality videos : Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2) Embed Higher Quality Videos : While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

3) Cut the chase and link to the interesting part : Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4) Hide the search box : The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5) Embed only a part of Video : Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6) Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering : Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode>

7) Download Video : Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching. Firefox Addons like downloadvideohelper, grabitall, youtubevideodownloader etc.. also can be used to download the video from the youtube.

8) Autoplay a Video : If you want your embedded video to start playing automatically, once again you can do so by simply modifying the url. In this case you need to append the string “&autoplay=1” to the url and remove everything before and after the embed tag.

9) Loop a Video : If you wish to loop a video add the string “ &loop=1” to the end of the url.

10) Disable related videos in YouTube’s embedded Player : Many webmasters may want to disable related videos in YouTube’s embedded player since it encourages the reader to navigate away from the current website. Once again the solution is as simple as appending the string “rel=0” to the video URL.

Instead of manually modifying the embed code you can let a new service called VTubeTools do it. VTubeTools.com allows you to customize your YouTube player with a few clicks. You can resize the player, autostart the video, loop the video and enable high quality version. It also allows you to set custom background (you can just change the colours or even use your own background picture).

11) Embed a Part of a YouTube Video : Youtube supports a parameter called “start” that allows start playing an embedded video after a specified number of seconds. For example if the interesting part of the video begins only after 20 seconds you need to use the code &start=20.

Example Code:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/KyuPDRflFDU&hl=en&fs=1&start=20“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk...tart=20” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Alternatively you can use the service Splicd to extract only a certain portion of a Youtube video.