How to resume YouTube videos automatically or manually
Whenever you open a video page on the video hosting site YouTube, it starts to play from the beginning. While that is not an issue if you never opened the video before, it is one if you want to resume a video that you played before.
Update: YouTube seems to have its own resume feature, but it only is available under certain conditions. You need to be signed in, the video you are playing needs to be at least 20 minutes, and you need to have watched at least one minute of it.
Maybe you are watching a lecture or presentation on YouTube and want to resume it at the position you stopped watching the other day. Or you like to watch gaming videos and want to make sure you don't miss any of the action.
Finding the position manually takes time and chance is that you will have to adjust the position slider several times before you can start watching the video again.
It is possible to automate the process but only if you use third-party software, extensions or bookmarklets, to do so.
Google Chrome
There are several extensions available for Google Chrome that provide you with options to resume videos that you have started to watch before on the video hosting site.
Video Resumer works automatically, which means that it will remember the position of any video you watch on YouTube, including embedded videos on third-party websites regardless of how you end playback.
It works if you close the browser window or tab the video is playing in for instance.
The extension makes available two options that you my find useful. It won't remember positions if only five seconds or less of playback are left, and will forget about videos after seven days. These two values can be changed on the options page.
Firefox
Video Resumer for Firefox has been created by the same company that developed the Chrome extension. It offers the same feature set and will resume videos automatically if you stop playback in one way or the other.
The options too are identical so that you can modify them on the options page of the add-on as well to modify them.
Manual option
If you require the service only occasionally, you may not want to install an add-on or browser extension for that.
YouTube supports adding time information to video urls so that videos start playback at the specified point in time.
All you have to do is add &t=4m42s to the video url and replace the m (minutes) and s (seconds) values. Here is a example of how this looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zus2Q2RB42Q&t=4m42s
You can then bookmark the video to resume playback at a later point in time.
A service like YouTube Bedtime provides you with the means to create these kind of urls automatically.
thanks from me too!
I really miss smart-pause for firefox. Video would auto pause when you switched to another tab. I’ve not found another plugin that offers this feature.
“Whenever you open a video page on the video hosting site YouTube, it starts to play from the beginning. While that is not an issue if you never opened the video before, it is one if you want to resume a video that you played before”.
Martin, that statement is factually incorrect. YouTube auto resumes videos longer than 20 minutes if you are logged in and you do not clear the session cookie. This feature has been available since 2009 and I use it all the time.
http://youtube-global.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/release-notes-91709.html
http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/youtube-resume.html
Nope. I am using Video Resumer and it has stopped saving the place I left off in the video. I tried closing the tab the video is in, I’m signed in, and have the video resumer options set correct so that it does not stop working until there is only 1 second left in the video, and does not to forget the video until over 100 days.
What happened to the buffered video if you want to back up a minute to show someone something? Where’s THAT Google “feature”?
Oh yeah that’s right, Google killed it.
Downloading works much better.
Did not know that. Then again, I’m rarely logged in when I use the site.
“All you have to do is add &t=4m42s” neat…thanks:-)