How to Do a Partial YouTube Embed (Custom Start and End)?

Suppose you have a long YouTube video but would like to do an embed only from say first to second minute? It's actually possible with a simple tweak.

The following is the standard embed code (without changing anything) of the PSY - Gangnam Style YouTube from first to second minute.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9bZkp7q19f0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

To do a partial embed from the first to second minute, you will first need to convert the periods into seconds. So it would be from the 1*60=60 seconds to the 2*60=120 seconds. We will then add the 2 new start and end parameters to the embed code. The following is the customised embed code.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9bZkp7q19f0?start=60&end=120" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The video goes like this!

YouTube Does a Harlem Shake With an Easter Egg

YouTube has joined Harlem Shake. Simply perform a search on 'do the Harlem Shake' on YouTube to reveal the Easter Egg.

The Harlem Shake effect starts off with the YouTube's logo shaking, followed by the search results. A video record of the Easter Egg is as follows:

Accessing Google Services for Slow Internet Connections

Accessing some of the Google services which are rich in content may be frustrating if your Internet connection is slow. Here are some helpful features as compiled by the unofficial Google Operating System blog.

1. Gmail's basic HTML mode

Access inbox using https://mail.google.com/mail/h/.

2. Disable Google Instant and auto-complete suggestions

Disable Google Instant at https://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en and then use https://www.google.com/search?complete=0 for search.

3. YouTube Feather

Access using experimental http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta.

4. The old Google image search interface

Access using https://www.google.com/imghp?sout=1.

5. Chrome's click-to-play feature

Type chrome://chrome/settings/content on your Chrome address bar and press enable "Click to Play" in the "Plug-Ins" section to loads content that requires plug-ins on demand.

6. Google's transcoder

Access website using http://google.com/gwt/n to compress websites before loading.

7. The text-only Google Cache

Load a simplified version of the page directly from Google Cache by accessing http://www.google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:www.domain.com (replace www.domain.com with the URL of the page) on your browser.

8. Chrome's custom user agent feature

Load webpages in mobile devices user agent does the trick of loading pages quicker.

To change the user agent in Chrome, open the developer tools (Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux, Command-Option-I for Mac), click the "Settings" button at the bottom of the window, click "User Agent", enable "Override User Agent", select "Android 4.0.2 - Google Nexus" or "iPhone - iOS 5.0" from the list and disable "override device metrics".

9. Google Public DNS

Google Public DNS is a simple way to speed up your browsing experience if the DNS service you're using is slow.

10. Use a browser that supports SPDY

SPDY, a new protocol "designed for low-latency transport of content over the World Wide Web." Right now, SPDY is supported by Chrome and Firefox, while many Google sites use it.

11. Google+ in mobile

Access Google+ using https://m.google.com/app/plus/x/ loads Google+ on mobile version, saving precious bandwidth.

YouTube statistics - 4 billion daily views, 1 hour of video uploaded every second

Wonder just how much content YouTube is generating? According to the latest statistics, daily views is at 4 billion and in every second, an hour of video is uploaded.

To put all these numbers into perspective, YouTube has launched a new website - onehourpersecond.com. Here's a short sample:

» Holy Nyans! 60 hours per minute and 4 billion views a day on YouTube | YouTube Blog

The new YouTube

The new YouTube is now more social friendly.

Google integrates YouTube into Google+

Google announced the integration of YouTube into Google+.

Already, users are able to share YouTube videos on Google+ right in YouTube, however, the functionality is now integrated right in Google+. Google+ users will now see a small YouTube tab at the right hand side of their screen now when logged in just like the following.

YouTube icon on Google+

It's no secret that YouTube is filled with tons of great content (from inspiring speeches to music videos to honey badgers). We wanted to bring YouTube directly into Google+—as well as make it easier to watch and share your favorites—so we're launching a YouTube "slider" in the stream.

How does it works:

• Mouse over the new YouTube icon at the top right of Google+
• It'll slide out and ask, "What would you like to play"?
• Enter whatever you're in the mood for (like a topic or a musical artist)

Search on YouTube in Google+

YouTube's Google+ video player showing playlist

In the video playlist, you can +1 a video you like or share it with your circles. Even if the video playlist window is minimized it is still possible to pause a video or skip to the next video directly from Google+.

Playback control

» Shipping the Google in Google+ | Official Google Blog

YouTube Blog: Additional Creator Tools from YouTube

Google-owned YouTube has announced 3 new improvements

1. Convert your 2D videos into 3D with a single click. (beta!)

Once you've uploaded your 2D videos to YouTube, you can convert them to 3D with the click of a button. Converted videos will be viewable by everyone in 3D. You'll still get best results with a 3D camera, but it's a great new way to let people enjoy your finest moments. You'll find this feature by selecting "Edit Info", then "3D Video" on a video you've uploaded. (Note, you'll still need glasses to watch on most devices)

2. All verified users in good standing can now upload long-form videos

Today, YouTube is enabling long uploads for users with a clean track record who complete an account verification and continue to follow the copyright rules set forth in our Community Guidelines.

To help you get those longer videos online, there is a recently launched resumable uploads, which ensures that you won’t lose any of the minutes you’ve uploaded if your internet fails or your computer dies during the upload process. You can resume uploading right where you left off once you’re back online. (Note: Advanced uploader is no longer required to upload large files)

3. Shoot, edit and share your videos easily with vlix and Magisto, now on youtube.com/create

Two additional video creation platforms are added to make your videos even better: Vlix and Magisto. Vlix lets you spice up your videos by adding cool effects and text to the video intro and closing. Magisto takes your unedited video and automatically edits it into short, fun clips.

» Additional Creator Tools from YouTube | YouTube Blog

YouTube allow editing of videos online

YouTube now supports editing of your own uploaded videos right on YouTube itself. To get started, read YouTube Help. The printable version is available here.

See what you can edit in the video below

» Edit your videos with YouTube | YouTube Blog

YouTube doodle - Rostrum in conjunction with Obama address to Congress

YouTube Doodle

Today's YouTube doodle shows a rostrum in conjunction with U.S. President Obama address to Congress, presenting the American Jobs Act, in an attempt to boost employment rate.

Share YouTube videos on Google+ Hangout

You can now start a Google+ Hangout with a YouTube video, directly from YouTube. This was announced on Brian Glick's, YouTube product manager, google+ account.

To share, just click on "Share" underneath any video, and then click on "Start a Google+ Hangout" in the bottom right-hand corner.

YouTube Cosmic Panda - New Black User Interface

YouTube has released a new interface code-named Cosmic Panda, showcasing black player's controls. On top of that, video thumbnails are spotted to be slightly bigger and playlist a complete makeover.

YouTube new Cosmic Panda UI

The new interface can be enabled and disabled at http://youtube.com/cosmicpanda.

Google: Watch the lunar eclipse from anywhere

A rare total lunar eclipse will happen today, resulting in a blood red moon from Singapore time (GMT+8) 3.25am to 5am later today. A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes behind the earth so that the earth blocks the sun's rays from striking the moon. Because the Earth is between the Sun and the Moon, only red light from the Sun is able to reach the Moon's surface.

Google has made it possible for all to be able to witness the lunar eclipse. Google has worked with Slooh Space Camera to let you experience the spectacle wherever you are in the world, in real time.

Slooh will host a live mission interface using Google App Engine that lets anyone not lucky enough to live in certain areas (South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia) take part in this rare astronomical event. It’s equipped with audio narrations from real-life astronomers so you can hear a firsthand, expert account of the event. You can also watch the live stream on the Google YouTube Channel or from the Sky layer in Google Earth (download this kml), while exploring the fascinating world that exists in our galaxy. Finally, those of you on the go can download the Slooh Space Camera Android app to view the images right on your phone.

Watch the lunar eclipse from anywhere [via]

YouTube's pages for blogs - ‘As Seen On’ YouTube pages

YouTube can now automatically generates pages that list the most recent videos embedded in a blog with the launch of ‘As Seen On’ YouTube pages.

By crawling web feeds of sites that have embedded videos, we’ve built dedicated pages that highlight your embedded videos. This means that there is now a place on YouTube to find videos mentioned on your favorite blogs & sites. We think these pages provide a way to find new and interesting content while helping you dive deeper into the conversation around a video.

One example for favourite blog is the Gizmodo.

‘As Seen On’ YouTube pages: celebrating content curators [via]

YouTube Instant inspired by Google Instant

After the launch of Google Instant, a third part geek came out with an "Instant" search for YouTube. Visit YouTube Instant now. It attempts to instantly play the first video from search list.

Note that YouTube Instant is not official from Google or YouTube.

YouTube introduced new mobile website

YouTube just launched a new version of their mobile site at m.youtube.com, offering higher quality video playback.

As demonstrated, the new mobile website works on both Google Android and Apple iPhone.

YouTube Mobile gets a kick start [via]

YouTube Adds Vuvuzela Button

OMG! YouTube actually came out with a new button for playing the extremely loud and irritating vuvuzela sound file, now often heard of in all World Cup 2010 matches played in South Africa.

According to Wikipedia,

The vuvuzela, also known as lepatata (its Tswana name), stadium horn and plastic trumpet, is a typical 65 cm (2.13 ft) plastic blowing horn that produces a loud, distinctive monotone B♭3 note (the B♭ below middle C).

Watch out for the "football" icon at the control bar.

This instrument is made popular across the world with fans playing them during World Cup matches.

YouTube allows stop buffering video feature

YouTube added a new feature to stop buffering a video. Previously, if you were to pause a video, the video continues downloading itself. However, there can be times when the played video is not interesting and so a stop buffering feature would be great to save some bandwidth especially for slow network connections users.

This new feature is useful but then it is a shame that YouTube did not get it work properly. The download should stop once "stop buffering" is selected but the player should still continue playing the frames already buffered. And to make it more perfect, there should also be a "Resume downloading" option.

YouTube Makes Captioning Available to All

YouTube has moved its automatic speech-recognition and closed-captioning technology out of beta and have now made it available to all. It also includes two BETA features, on-the-fly language translation and audio transcription, and both are still quite buggy from my observation.

You may watch the video below and play around with the new Captioning feature. Play with the two BETA features and you should observe the many "bugs".

YouTube Makes Captioning Available to All [via]

Dirpy - Convert YouTube videos into MP3 for listening

Dirpy allows you to easily convert YouTube video to MP3 audio. Another useful feature Dirpy provides is the flexibility to rip only specific segment e.g. 1:00 to 2:00 minute.

Dirpy: YouTube to Mp3 Converter
http://www.dirpy.com/

YouTube Resume from where you left off

YouTube added a simple but useful feature a couple of days ago to allow a video to be resumed from where it left off before it is closed. This resume feature will apply only to videos that are longer than 20 minutes and if you've watched more than one minute of the video and there are more than three minutes left.

Excerpt from YouTube Release Notes: 9/17/09:

Resume where you left off: Let's say you're watching an epic (read: longer than 20 minutes) video, and you get distracted and click away. The next time you return to the video, it will resume where you left off watching, assuming you've watched more than one minute of the video and there are more than three minutes left.

YouTube Release Notes: 9/17/09 [via]