Forum Tech: Adding YouTube Windows

[delmarrey]

I’ve noticed that when some members add a YouTube link to posts that it shows a window of the video main screen.
But with my iPad it only shows a link to YouTube.

Is there a pull-down somewhere I’m missing, or is this a glitch in the program?

[jmh2002]

Sadly the forum software that this site uses is very bare bones.

If you use the "share" functionality from YouTube this creates a different url format (youtu.be) which this forum doesn't recognise and insert as a video preview.

Instead you need to copy (or manually edit) the actual url of the video for the video preview to work.

On the other hand sometimes you don't want to clutter the thread with the large preview though, so then the youtu.be url can be a good option just to display a link.

Another tip is that you can also add (without quotes) "&t=xxx" (xxx = time in seconds) to the end of the standard url to start a video at a certain point (the share url also has a extra option to do that automatically too).


Hope that helps

Here's some examples of the same video using the three different links (you can see that the actual id of the video - dj3wZvBTmj4 - is the same in each example):

Special url from the 'share' menu: https://youtu.be/dj3wZvBTmj4

Standard url:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj3wZvBTmj4

and here starting at 1 minute - you can see i added "&t=60" to the standard url:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj3wZvBTmj4&t=60

[delmarrey]

https://youtu.be/4dsks7VZPyg

No resolve but a nice tip on time saving.

[jmh2002]

Originally Posted by delmarrey

https://youtu.be/4dsks7VZPyg

No resolve but a nice tip on time saving.

Right, so that's the youtu.be (share) link which will NOT show a video preview here on this forum.

but using the full url it will:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dsks7VZPyg

[delmarrey]

Oh I see ….. got it. Thank You!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXyJHXHKzcw

[jmh2002]

Originally Posted by delmarrey

Oh I see ….. got it. Thank You!