Start YouTube Video Automatically from a Specific Time

Have you ever wanted to post a YouTube video on your blog or page, but automatically start it at a specific point in the video? Maybe the video is a speech and the point you are referencing is 3 minutes in to the video, or maybe it’s your favorite motorcycle crash in a video montage of motorcycle crashes. Either way, you don’t want to embed the video and then write instructions to fast forward to the 3 minute mark. There’s an easier way. Simply grab the embed code and then modify it just a little to make the video start at the point you want. Here’s how to do it:


Copy the YouTube code you want to embed from the video information column on the YouTube video page. Paste the code into your text editor to make the changes.

example of YouTube embed code

Add &start=180 to the end of the YouTube video URL in both places inside the embed code (replacing 180 with the number of seconds you want to start inside the video). This will cause the video to start playing from that many seconds when a person clicks play on the embedded video.

Example of a start time added to the end of a YouTube embed.

If you want to automatically start the video, you also need to add &autoplay=1 to the end of each URL as well, which will cause the video to start playing from the point inside the video as soon as the page loads.

Example of adding autoplay to the end of a YouTube embed link