Currently Google is facing so many competitors in the video services. While social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are getting more serious with their video services, other services such as Vimeo and Dailymotion have ben around for years combating YouTube.
But, still. YouTube remains the first destination for videos. Not only because of it has abundant videos from any genre. Many people still love YouTube because it can deliver videos in a better way and also faster.
By the way, did you ever tried playing with the URL of a specific YouTube video?. There are some hidden tricks behind a YouTube URL that you probably haven’t know. All you need to do is copying the full URL of a specific YouTube video and repaste to the address bar of your browser with a bit modifications. Below are some hidden tricks of a YouTube URL.
Skip to a specific part of the video
Normally, people will slide the progress bar of YouTube to skip the boring intro and jump to a specific part they love.
Let’s take an example of a video from Linkin Park’s What I’ve Done. I love the part when Chester (the vocalist) jump with his microphone in a slow motion. The part is at minute 2:10. So I want to jump to the minute of 2:10. You can jump to a specific minute and second in YouTube by manually adding &t=YmXXs to the end of the YouTube URL. Replace Y with minute and XX with second. Take a look at the example below to make it clear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sgycukafqQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sgycukafqQ&t=2m10s
2. Loop the video infinitely
Apart from funny videos, YouTube is also a great place to explore music videos from your favorite singers and bands. YouTube will normally present you the next track every time you finished with a video. If you like me, sometimes I want to listen a music video more and more especially when it’s my favorite song. Sadly, YouTube has no feature to enable us loop the video. But, you can accomplish this by replace the word of “youtube” in the video URL with “youtuberepeater”. This will open the video at youtuberepeater.com, which will loop the video for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sgycukafqQ
https://www.youtuberepeater.com/watch?v=8sgycukafqQ
3. Ignone age restrictions
YouTube is working to keep its videos be relevant for the users based on age. There are some videos that are restricted to a specific group of age. When a video is flagged as containing mature content you need to login with your YouTube account to ensure you are mature enough.
In case you are lazy enough to login or simply haven’t had an account, you can by pass the age restriction by replace the “watch?v=” with “v”. It will looks like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sgycukafqQ
https://www.youtube.com/v/8sgycukafqQ
Your video will be showed in a full screen mode and you can watch it without having to login.
4. Download and convert the video
You probably already know that there are a lot of third party services to let you download and export the YouTube video to other formats. They mostly require you to install additional browser add-on or desktop app.
There is a simpler way if you want to download a YouTube video as well as converting to other formats like MP3, MP4 and a lot more. Add “pwn” right before the word of “youtube” in the video URL you want to download. It will looks like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sgycukafqQ
https://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=8sgycukafqQ
5. Get the thumbnail of the video
I don’t what you are going to do with that thumbnail but if you curious enough to see a YouTube video’s thumbnail, you can get it by visiting the following URL.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/[VideoID]/maxresdefault.jpg
Replace the [VideoID] with the text after “=”. For example, I want to see the thumbnail of the video with the URL of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3ytTKZf344. So, it should looks like this.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/A3ytTKZf344/maxresdefault.jpg
Please note. This method only apply to a video with a determined thumbnail. Not all YouTube videos have a determined thumbnail. Some prefer to use default thumbnail from YouTube.