Lessons learned about linking and embedding videos on YouTube

Today I spent a bit of time poking around http://youtube.com/gritv looking for videos of great presentations to share from the Amsterdam Global Conference on Transparency and Sustainability I had the pleasure of participating in last week. The videos are short and chopped up in a rather unwieldy way, so in the process of sharing my favorite talks I had to figure out a few things. I have recorded my learnings below - perhaps you also have some suggestions - please add them as comments to this post. 

Link to specific place in a YouTube Video 

You can link to a specific spot in a YouTube Video by adding a bit of extra code to the URL - this is called deep-linking. Here's how it can be done, as explained in a post by Matt Cutts:  

If you want to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube, you can. For example,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s

Notice the “#t=31m08s” on the end of the url? That link will take you 31 minutes and 8 seconds into that video. Linking to a particular minute and second can be really helpful — for example, that link takes you straight to where someone asks Eric Schmidt a question about Twitter. From there, you can listen to his answer, where he says (among other things):

“We’re in favor of all of these new communications mechanisms. …. I think the innovation is great …. Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to communicate, especially if you’re willing to do so publicly.”

Deep-linking to a specific part of a YouTube video is really easy, so I wanted give a short example to tell how to link to a certain minute and second of a video.

I did this to create a tweet linking to Kumi Naidoo's inspiring closing plenary speech, which I recommend everyone watch and reflect on: 

@kuminaidoo inspiring #griconference talk Part 1: http://bit.ly/aRipMm Part 2: http://bit.ly/a9vX7n Part 3:http://bit.ly/cTCPzw

The links are all shortened using bit.ly. The first link goes straight to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t42dJmfzLM#t=4m56s which is the moment in the video when Kumi is introduced. 

Embed a YouTube video starting at a specific place

It is also possible to embed a YouTube video to a blog post on your own website. I learned how to do this in a post on the Google Operating System Unofficial news and tips about Google blog. Here's the relevant bit:

If you want to embed a YouTube video that starts to become interesting somewhere in the middle, there's a simple way to skip the boring part. YouTube's embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video. Here's how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2t42dJmfzLM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&start=300" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Kabissa's blog editor currently doesn't support pasting in the full embed code for security reasons, but you can still embed videos via the Flash feature (look for the red circle in the editor with the f logo in it).

To embed a video in a blog post on Kabissa, you would:

1. grab the embed code from YouTube and paste it into a text editor
2. Find and copy the URL to the flash video which looks like this example linking to the video containing the first part of Kumi Naidoo's speech: http://www.youtube.com/v/2t42dJmfzLM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0
3. Kumi is introduced 296 seconds (about 5 minutes) into the video, so to start there I added the &start=296 code to the end of the URL so it looks like this: http://www.youtube.com/v/2t42dJmfzLM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&start=296
4. Click the red FLASH icon when editing your post on Kabissa and paste in the URL. 
5. Optionally, you can set parameters such as the width and height of the video (get this from the embed code from YouTube) as well as optional border and vertical and horizontal space.

The result in this case looks like this: 

Keep watching: Part 2: http://bit.ly/a9vX7n Part 3:http://bit.ly/cTCPzw

Mind the 11 minute limit on YouTube videos - and consider Vimeo as alternative

I was surprised to learn via @mvelandi that YouTube has a "selective and vague policy on longer videos than 11mins". He recommends using Vimeo for this reason, which I do see more frequently than YouTube these days from colleagues sharing videos. 

@kabissa Cool. I hate YouTube's selective & vague policy on longer videos than 11min. It's why I use Vimeo for my co's conference vids :)

Think of a user-friendly file naming convention 

If you are uploading alot of videos from the same event, keep in mind that YouTube doesn't display long file names. So consider putting the number at the start of the file name so you can quickly see the order, like this:  

1 Closing Plenary - Signposts on the road to sustainability: Where do we go from here? (Part 1 of 10)
2 Closing Plenary - Signposts on the road to sustainability: Where do we go from here? (Part 2 of 10)