Nifty little trick: embed parts of a YouTube video

You probably recognize the situation of wanting to embed a YouTube video that is interesting for ten seconds. If only it wouldn’t take five minutes before the video reaches that point. Alex Chitu from Google Operating System writes that YouTube’s embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video.

Here’s how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs. When you use this, you can, for instance, start the official Web 2.0 bubble burst video when the first girl is about to jump in the smashing pool.

There’s no permalink to a certain part of a video. The only way of getting there is clicking on a video that’s embedded with the right parameters. According to Philipp Lenssen, a generic wrapper site could be created for that purpose.