How to Embed a Youtube Video at a Specific Start Time as of July 2013

Recently I wrote a post with an embedded YouTube video that started at a designated time. You/tube is not very helpful when you want to do this. You can link a video at a specific start time with a simple check box. This will add a code ?t=XmYs where X stands for minutes and Y stands for seconds (or just ?=Ys for when there are no minutes). But if you try to change the video URL in your embed code with this, it won't work.

So I looked around for a solution, sure I wasn't the only person who ever tried to embed at a video at a specific start time. I found several old blogs that suggested adding the ?t=XmYs code into the link, just as I had already tried. Sadly, this used to be supported by YouTube, but it's since changed. But to what?

I kept looking and found a few posts that suggested #t=XXXX where XXXX was the time in seconds. It didn't work either.

Finally, I stumbled upon Jonathan Weatherhead's blog where he said that the code was ?start=XXXX where XXXX is time in seconds. Amazingly, it worked.

So, if you're not familiar with the youtube embed code, it looks like this:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.VIDEO_URL" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

In real life, that "VIDEO_URL" would actually be a YouTube link, at the end of which you should add the code ?start=XXXX, except that XXXX will be the time you want the video to start at in seconds. So if you wanted the video to start at 2 minutes, you would write ?start=120.

As we learned earlier, YouTube changes this frequently, so if this no longer works, please leave a comment so I can update the post. I'd appreciate if you said what does work now, but I can do the research, I'd much rather know if it was broken.

A note: Blogger seems to have an app that helps it's users with this, and WordPress, of course, has multiple options for people who need more than the standard YouTube embed features. So there are multiple ways to ensure you get the most out of your YouTube embedding experience.