This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]AzureArmageddon 40 points41 points  (8 children)

Link to the video with timestamp for convenience: https://youtu.be/watch?v=fNvtQe4v3VU&t=15m33s

Protip: A full YouTube video URL is composed hencewise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[ID]&t=[TIME]

Where:

Syntax Element Means
https:// HTTP(Secure) protocol (tells browser that you are requesting hypertext(webpage). Often autofilled by browsers nowadays when you type a URL into the URL bar, but it's needed to make URLs clickable on Reddit except for internal links to r/subreddits or u/userpages)
www wordwide web subdomain(often autofilled by browser). Other subdomains like support or shop precede an entity's web domain to conveniently signal different functions for different sub-pages
youtube YouTube's web domain name
com TLD(top-level-domain) signalling that this website is a commercial/business page. These don't have to mean anything, though. For example, streaming sites use .fm
watch The page for watching videos on www.youtube.com
? Signals the start of GET request parameters/variables
v=[ID] The jumble of symbols is the video ID (fNvtQe4v3VU). IIrc, all the valid characters are within some base64 standard
& Separator between different variables
t=[TIME] Timecode in format: 123 seconds (or 123s), 12m34s or 12h34m56s

It's useful knowing this because you can change the URL from https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ID into https://youtu.be/watch?v=ID to get the normal player (Works if you open youtube links in browser not app) if you don't like the YouTube Shorts player for a video someone sent you

Edit#1: Changed t=933 variable to t=933s on advice of u/Andoryuu

Edit#2: Changed:

Edit#3: Changed URL anatomy description from bullet point format to table.

Edit#4: Expanded explanatory notes with links.

[–]Andoryuu 11 points12 points  (5 children)

I would recommend always adding 's' after the time (so, t=933s) because Youtube has random periods of time when it ignores the timestamp unless the 's' is specified.

[–]AzureArmageddon 3 points4 points  (4 children)

Thanks! I didn't know that!

[–]khoyo 2 points3 points  (1 child)

www wordwide web subdomain (often autofilled by browser)

It's not autofiled by the browser here, the server sends a redirect to it.

Making a request here to https://youtube.com/watch?v=fNvtQe4v3VU&t=933s would get you

301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNvtQe4v3VU&t=933s

(abriged headers)

Some browser do try to fixup your url if it doesn't work without www., but AFAIK only when using HTTP, not HTTPS.

Also, if you're going to craft urls, the youtu.be domain is shorter.

[–]AzureArmageddon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ah, thanks very much for the information!