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A long time ago I posted a suggestion on the youTube developers forum, hinting at how nice would it be to pass a variable from the URL to the actual video in order to have the clip start playing at a different location other than the start. I figured it could be useful in cases where one wishes to send a youTube link to a co-worker, friend or family member, but ‘cue’ the video to start a few seconds or minutes into it (who knows, maybe the beginning is truly boring uh?). I got many replies saying that it was an excellent idea, but I never followed the conclusion of it. Now I find out that youTube uses a variable called ’seekTo’ in order to cue videos.

It turns out that when somebody leaves a comment on a youtube video, and writes the minute:second code, for example: “He guys, I loved this at 2:48″, youtube creates a ’seekTo’ link that allows the user to click the time posted on that comment and that will automatically fast forward the video to that location.

But what if you wish to pass the ’seekTo’ variable directly on the link? Well, all you have to do is to add the following code: #t=294
Where the actual number represents the seconds where you want the video to start playing upon entering the URL on the address bar of the browser. To obtain the number, you simply multiply the number of minutes times sixty and add the seconds. So a video that you wish it to start playing at minute 5 and second 17 becomes: 5:17 = 5×60+17=317
On the screenshot you see a video I wanted to start playing at minute 4 with 54 seconds, so I passed the variable #t=294 and the full URL became: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk1t6S737Cs#t=294

Notice that this works with clean URLs (don’t have messy URLs with extra code or referrer links to test this out), and I believe that in turn it may actually help to save bandwidth for both the user and youTube servers. This may not be a new finding, but I believe that knowing how to do this is not well known to youTube users.