YouTube Tip: Shortcut To Skip Part Of A Video

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 8, 2012
Updated • Jan 30, 2015
Tutorials, Youtube
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13

If you are an Internet regular you have probably heard about the Wadsworth Constant, an Internet meme that has come to some fame at the end of last year.

A user named Wadsworth mentioned that he skipped 30% ahead of every YouTube he was viewing on the Internet. This spread quickly throughout the geeky parts of the Internet and became that popular that YouTube implemented the constant as a parameter on the video hosting site.

If you add &wadsworth=1 at the end of the YouTube video url you are skipping the first 30% of the video. A bookmarklet has been created soon thereafter which automated the process.

There is however a much easier solution that that all YouTube users can make use of to skip ahead a certain percentage of the video. All that needs to be done is to press a number between 1 and 9 on the YouTube video page after you have clicked on the video.

Nothing happens if you try to press the numbers once the video starts playing on the side. You need to click on the video, which pauses it, to use the functionality.

The numbers 1 to 9 correspond to 10 to 90 per cent of the play time of the video. If you press 3 you skip ahead 30% as suggested by the Wadsworth Constant, but you can select to skip more or less of the video by tapping on a different number on your keyboard.

This works well in combination with scripts that auto pause a video automatically, for instance to let it buffer for a while or save bandwidth by avoiding auto play.

We have reviewed several scripts that can do that here on Ghacks. Check out the userscript Automatically Buffer Youtube Videos and Youtube Videos: Playback Problems And Fixes for general tips.

The constant works sometimes but not all of the time. It works great for trailers and videos produced by tv or film studios. You will obviously encounter videos where it does not work at all as you miss an essential part of it.

Have you tried to skip ahead in videos to save time by skipping ahead to the important content?

Update: The wadsworth parameter is not working anymore. You can still hit the number keys on the other hand to skip part of the video.

Summary
YouTube Tip: Shortcut To Skip Part Of A Video
Article Name
YouTube Tip: Shortcut To Skip Part Of A Video
Description
Find out how to skip the beginning of any YouTube video with a simple shortcut that works all the time.
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Comments

  1. Transcontinental said on January 9, 2012 at 12:21 am
    Reply

    I understand “Carpe diem” as seizing the moment, otherwise understanding it as enjoying the day is relevant precisely of what I was condemning :) The moment, the instant of time, not an amount of what may be achieved nor a delay to find it, to find what ?
    30 %… gosh!

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on January 9, 2012 at 12:32 am
      Reply

      I always thought of it more in the way of doing something useful with your day, and what better way to achieve that than to optimize what you need to do to achieve that ;)

  2. dave said on January 8, 2012 at 6:01 pm
    Reply

    Numbers in the numberpad don’t work for this trick (on a MAC), but numbers above qwerty do. Zero works too.

  3. Transcontinental said on January 8, 2012 at 2:01 pm
    Reply

    Why skip the leading 30% of a video ? Because it’s useless ? On behalf of what reason, principle ? What am I missing in not understanding the pertinence of this idea ?
    Either I am nuts either this world is becoming mad (or both ?!)

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on January 8, 2012 at 3:32 pm
      Reply

      Well the theory is that the first 30 or so per cent of the video are not really needed to view it. As I said, it does not work for all videos, but trailers and the like often do well.

      1. Transcontinental said on January 8, 2012 at 6:22 pm
        Reply

        I have no doubt the trick works, I was and remain puzzled at the very idea of deciding that a 30% or so of a video is useless (the number of those who agree on this idea is phenomenal apparently).
        This “twitter syndrome” as I call modern need of compression everywhere, the opposite of a “carpe diem”, is in my view somewhat insane, as is the arrogance of deciding what is necessary, unless the approach be that of survival. Are we surviving ?

      2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 8, 2012 at 8:22 pm
        Reply

        I’d say it depends on your translation of carpe diem ;) Making use of the day could very well mean to speed up information gathering, while enjoying the day could mean to not rush it.

  4. Robert Palmar said on January 8, 2012 at 3:05 am
    Reply

    Whenever I need to skip forward I mouse-over the sliding time-line
    and move to a time I deem appropriate and click which
    jumps the video forward to play at that point.

    I could not get the interesting tricks in this article to work
    but likely the many scripts I have running for YouTube
    would have to be disabled because one interferes.

  5. WebHybrid said on January 8, 2012 at 2:48 am
    Reply

    Thanks to Martin for more eye-opening remarks; I had no idea these tricks and [earlier reviewed] scripts existed.

    An added mention – one YouTube handling enhancer for Firefox/Mozilla that was previously noted in Ghacks [https://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/31/how-to-stop-video-autoplay-on-youtube/]: “TubeStop”

    See http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/tubestop/
    or the Firefox add-ons page https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tubestop/

    One of my favorite add-ons, it performs just a single service: killing the YouTube autoplay.

    TubeStop doesn’t begin buffering the video, preferable to me because buffering still eats up bandwidth I’d rather not concede until I’m ready to initiate a play or pause-and-let-buffer… manually.

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