How to Link a YouTube Video at a Specific Time on Mobile.
If you’re like me, who skims through a 15 minute long tutorial only to find out that learning itself begins in the last five minutes, you know how frustrating it is to waste time. So when I share them with my friends or team members, I often share them with the correct timestamp so that they don’t have to waste time listening to the intro. However, there is only one limitation: the time stamp function is only available on a PC. So what do you do when there is a time stamp on your phone? Here’s how to share a time stamped YouTube video from your mobile.
Read How to Use the YouTube Music Collaborative Playlist Feature
desktop
Before moving on to mobile, we need to see how YouTube desktop timestamps work. As you can see, whenever you click the Share button, you can choose between which social media platform you will use to post, the copy link option, and the timestamp feature at the bottom.
Try clicking the Start button and notice how the link above it changes. Well yeah, it’s just a timestamp where t (time) is 27 seconds. Now let’s move on to our phone.
Share YouTube video with timestamp from mobile
On the phone, things are a little different. When you post, you don’t get a timestamp, you just copy the link and share it with other social media platforms. Since this feature is missing, you can try sharing the link with your friends and sending them the start time in chat, but it’s too boring and everyone does it. Here are two easy ways to do it.
Desktop view
Since we already know that the desktop has a time stamp feature, we can use the desktop view in the phone to take advantage of it. Let’s say you have a video, instead of opening it in the YouTube app, paste the link into your mobile browser. Now from the top right hamburger / three dots sign, open the options and turn on the desktop view. This will give you the exact sharing options, just like on the desktop, so you can just click on the share and scroll down to the part you want to share. You also have the option to click on the time ion (Start at) and enter it manually.
Manually adding time to a link
As you can see in the first GIF, once you turn on the timestamp (Start at), some more text is added to the URL. Simply put, if you need to share a YouTube video, can you just add? t = 27, time in seconds without spaces. Before – https://youtu.be/xnEqpwvaFFM After (after 76 seconds) – https://youtu.be/xnEqpwvaFFM?t=76
As you can see, you can easily add the time at the end of the url. The format is a bit calculated, but if you were careful when you were taught tables, you sorted.
Alternatively, you can also add minutes and seconds (XmYs) to the link instead of seconds. For example, 5m32s (five minutes 32 seconds). The only problem is that this method doesn’t always work, especially with links ending in YouTube.com, but it’s easier and worth trying.
Concluding remarks
So, these were several ways to share accurate time with friends of any YouTube video. I hope Google will also include a time stamp feature in the YouTube mobile app. If you ask me, I usually use the timecode for the link manually. This is not a problem until the video gets very long and you don’t even have to open Chrome and switch to desktop mode. So, I hope you can now share timestamped YouTube videos without any problem.
Also read how to watch YouTube on Android and iOS together