This week I’m going to show you some interesting things you can do with YouTube. You might not use all of them, but hopefully you will find one or two of them helpful, or at least fun to try out. I love “discovering” these kinds of little-known things and bringing them to you here on my blog, and on my podcast.

Sometimes you might watch a video you really like, so you bookmark it for easy access. But then you go back to YouTube a week later or a month later, and it’s gone. That happens all that time, for a variety of reasons. You can avoid that problem though. Instead of bookmarking it to go back and watch it on YouTube, just download the video to your own computer.  Then you can watch it anytime – even if you aren’t connected to the internet.

Example:

You like this video of this guy ranting about waiting in line at the post office (it actually is a pretty funny video if you want to watch it). When the video is on your screen, look up at the address bar. You’ll see the web address of the video displayed there (it’s also called the URL).  It looks like this:

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

All you have to do is click in the address bar, and change the web address to this:

pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=vDvaJJyUpTs

and then hit the Enter key on your keyboard. This will take you to a page where you will see a little preview of the video, and links where you can click to download the video.  Those links take you to a variety of other sites. Check them out and see which one you like best.

Yes, I know you could just go directly to any of those sites and copy/paste the URL of the video itself. The idea with these little YouTube tricks is that you don’t have to remember or bookmark all those other websites in order to download the video. Just add “pwn” to the YouTube address.

Maybe you subscribe to a YouTube channel that puts out a new video each day or each week, but you don’t really need to see the video portion. For some videos, the only thing to see is the person talking to the camera. Or, maybe you want to listen to the content while you’re driving, and it’s obviously not safe to watch the video then, so all you need is the audio. When you have the audio file saved, you can listen to it on your computer, or you could put it on your MP3 player or your phone for listening at your convenience.

Example:

There’s a video of Eric Clapton performing unplugged in 1992.  It’s a little over an hour long, so if you’re a Clapton fan, it would make a great sound file for while you’re out on a run, but obviously you don’t want to stream the video from YouTube and watch it while you’re running. You just need to do a little tweaking to the URL, similar to what we did in the first trick.

The web address of the video will look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w24A2eesrUA

You will want to move your cursor up there and change it to this:

listentoyoutube.com/watch?v=w24A2eesrUA

That takes you to a new page.  Look for this image and click the Go button. NOTE: This site has a lot of display ads and you might be tempted to click on things other than what I describe below. Don’t do that.

That will take you to a different page, where you’ll see a link to click for your Download button:

Finally, you’ll see a button to actually download the audio file in MP3 format:

When you click that, the file will be saved to your computer (usually it goes in the Downloads folder, but it might go somewhere else if you have set your preferences differently from the default).

You find a video on YouTube, and it shows people walking on a sidewalk where there’s a patch of ice. We all love to watch people fall down, right? The problem is, this video goes quite a way in before you actually see someone fall down. You know if you post this on Facebook, people will get bored pretty quickly if they don’t see some slipping and falling pretty quickly.

So what you need to do is “tweak” the URL so that the video doesn’t start playing at the very beginning – it starts playing at the point you want it to. Here’s the video we’ll use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCwMfUhv24

You check the video and find out that there are a bunch of people that “almost” fall, but the first person that actually hits the ground happens at the 1:32 point in the video.  So that’s where you want the video to start playing.

First, you have to convert that initial stretch of time to seconds.  One minute and 32 seconds translates to 92 seconds total, so “92” is the important number here. All you have to do is add #t=92 to the end of the video address.  So the adjusted URL would look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCwMfUhv24#t=92

Of course, you can substitute any number at the end, depending on exactly where you want to video to start playing when someone goes to that address.

What YouTube tricks do YOU know? Put them in the comments below!