Yesterday, I posted a YouTube video of a recent presentation. The group that recorded the video began recording well before I went on stage, so the video contained over 10 minutes of silence and a couple minutes of announcements.

I wanted to embed the video on my blog, but I wanted it to start playing at the moment the organizer introduced me.

YouTube provides an easy way to embed a video. Click the “Share” icon (Fig. 1) below the video

image
Fig. 1

Then, click the “Embed” link (Fig. 2) that appears below the “Share” link.

image
Fig. 2

If you click the “SHOW MORE” link, you will get a few options for your video (Fig. 3) but not the option to change the default start time. By default, your video will start at the very beginning when the user starts playing it.

image
Fig. 3

YouTube provides HTML that you can paste into your web page to embed a video. It looks similar to the following:

<iframe width="560" height="315" 
 src=https://www.youtube.com/embed/9wpN7Ho7DBQ?rel=0 
 frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>
iframe>

To set the start time, add a “start” parameter to the end of the URL in the iframe’s “src” attribute, as in the following example.

<iframe width="560" height="315" 
 src=https://www.youtube.com/embed/9wpN7Ho7DBQ?rel=0&amp;start=753 
 frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>
iframe>

The value of the “start” querystring parameter is the number of seconds from the beginning at which you want the video to start playing.

I wanted my video to start at the 12 minute, 33 second mark, so I had to do some math:

(12*60)+33=753

So I appended “start=753” to the src URL.