A note to fellow bloggers

This message will be useful only to those who blog, and more specifically, to those who occasionally embed videos in their blog.

At the Reddit board today was a link to an explanation of how to embed only a portion of a YouTube video. This is useful when there is only a small portion of the video you want to call to the attention of your visitors. In the past, you may have embedded a video and then told visitors to note something that happens at x:xx. By altering the embed code, you can have the video start wherever you wish.

The key is to add the term &start=999, where 999 is the number of seconds into the video that you want it to begin. You add that to BOTH urls in the embed code.

Here's the original embed code for the Laurel and Hardy "Music Box" clip above:



As posted at YouTube it's about 3 minutes long. If I want my embed to start at the 2-minute mark, I add &start=120 twice:



Voila. It now starts at the 2-minute mark, as noted by the timebar under the video. Note that you can do the same thing with Hulu videos by dragging the markers on the timebar before you copy the embed code.

Enjoy.