YouTube, one of the most popular video sites, and you maybe happen to visit and use it quite often. But you may not know the following YouTube URL tricks that you should know about. Let’s check it together.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Disable Related Videos

Publishing your content in the form of YouTube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0’ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

4. Auto play an embedded video

Normally when you embed a YouTube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1’ to the url part of the embed code.

5. Embed Higher Quality Videos

While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed high quality videos you need to append ‘&ap=%2526fmt%3D18’ and ‘&ap=%2526fmt%3D22’ to the embed url.

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. 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.

8. Loop an embedded video

Append ‘&loop=1’ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

9. 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.

10. Download Video

Although not inherently a YouTube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change YouTube to kick YouTube 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.

If you know other similar YouTube URL tricks and hacks, please feel free to share them with us!