Any way to get YouTube embedded videos to recognize "T=" parameter?

  • zendodeb · Member ·

    YouTube lets you (via links) specify a start time in a video. It is the “t=” parameter. You specify the number of seconds from the start of the video. (YouTube will supply that value if you request it to when you copy the URL of a video.)

    WordPress suppresses or ignores that parameter when you embed a video. It is beyond annoying.

    I have tried both ways of embedding a video. (URL by itself at the start of a line, and braces, with youtube= specified.) Neither works.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Based on Google’s developer documentation, the query parameter for starting a video at a specific point should be start, not t:

    https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters?hl=en#start

    In our own support page that is also the value we indicate should be used to customize the URL;

    https://en.support.wordpress.com/videos/youtube/#video-customization-options

    So it looks like Google might have changed how this works on their end, but without updating their developer documentation that third-party services like us rely on to provide support for features like these.

    I’ve opened a request on our end to have this updated so the new format will work, but meanwhile if you replace t with start in your Youtube URLs, or otherwise replace the second value with a minute/second value (e.g. t=110 with t=1m50s), which was how this originally worked, the embed should start at your specified timestamp. It appears Youtube still supports those legacy query parameters on their end.

    This should work with both the plain embed and the shortcode embed.

  • zendodeb · Member ·

    Thanks. When you ask YT to “share the link” and select “start at ___” it creates a URL with “t=” changing that to start= seems to work.

  • zendodeb · Member ·

    Though it would be nice if I could use the URL as generated by YouTube without having to have read the Google developers manual.

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