How to start a video at a specific moment

If the part worth watching is ninety seconds in, you can have the video open there. Nothing is edited, nothing is reuploaded, and the original video is untouched. It is one field in the builder: Playback, then Start at.

You can also set a stop time, which gives you a clip out of a longer video without any editing at all.

Finding the moment

The easiest way is to let YouTube tell you. Play the video, pause where you want it to begin, click Share, and tick the Start at box. The link it copies has the timestamp already on the end, and pasting that link into the builder brings the start time with it. You do not have to type anything.

If you would rather type it, the field takes seconds or a normal timestamp, so 90 and 1:30 both mean the same thing.

Trimming the end too

Stop at works the same way. Set both and you get a section: start at 1:30, stop at 2:05, and the viewer sees thirty-five seconds without knowing there was more.

Three things to know before you rely on it:

• The video does not disappear. A determined viewer can still drag the scrub bar backwards or forwards to the rest of it. This trims what plays, not what exists.
• Stop times are approximate on YouTube. The player stops at the nearest keyframe rather than the exact second, so it can overrun by a moment. If the frame it lands on matters, leave yourself a second of slack.
• Stop and loop do not combine well on YouTube. The stop time applies to the first play only. Once itloops, it runs to the real end.

Vimeo does not support a stop time at all. The field is greyed out with the reason under it rather than accepting a value the player will throw away.

Each platform does it differently

This is worth knowing only because it explains why copying an approach from one platform to another usually fails.

YouTube and Loom carry the start time as a setting on the address, in whole seconds. Vimeo does not. It reads the time from the very end of the link, in a different format that looks like 1m30s, and putting it where YouTube expects it does nothing at all. Anything generated here writes it the way the platform in question actually reads it.

Fractions of a second do not survive anywhere. Whole seconds only.

If there is more than one moment

A start time answers "begin here". It does not help when there are four places in a video that people want, which is the usual case with a tutorial, a walkthrough or a long interview.

That is what chapters are for: named buttons under the video that jump straight to a moment. Same idea, several destinations, and the viewer chooses instead of you choosing for them.

Sharing a timestamp is not the same thing

Worth separating, because the two get confused. A YouTube link with a timestamp on it, sent to somebody, opens on YouTube at that moment. A start time on an embed opens at that moment on your page, inside your layout, with whatever player styling you set.

Both are useful. If you are writing an article and referring to a specific moment in a video, embedding it at that moment is much better than telling people to skip to 4:12 and hoping they do.