WQYU – Blog

Sorry, I won’t be helping you how to get unauthorized access to someone else’s account on YouTube or how to take content that is copyrighted protected using DRM, HDCP or some other way of protecting copyrighted content however this quick little article will give you a few little tricks that you may find to be useful as a user and while the original publication did not cover anything about content creators, this updated version will.

Hacking YouTube’s URL

YouTube’s URL offers more than just away of getting to a YouTube video.

• Full Screen: If you enter “https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123” you can view the video in full screen.
• Full Screen with no audio: If you enter “https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123?mute=1″ the video will not have sound a.k.a. audio.
• Full Screen with auto play: If you enter “https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123?autoplay=1″ the video will start to play when you access the video, so no need to press play.
• Full Screen without controllers: If you enter “https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123?controls=0” the video will start to play when you access the video, so no need to press play.

You can add and mix mach them also like https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123?autoplay=1 and controls=0, but you must add the and “&” symbol between the one in this case and the word “controls” so it looks like this “https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123?autoplay=1&controls=0

0 (Zero) = Off/No and 1 = On/Yes

The same idea works with live streams, but the structure of the URL is a little different. In the live feed you can enter https://www.youtube.com/embed/live_stream?channel=abc123 and then after the 3 in this case add the “&” followed by the controls as what was shown above.

Whats this “UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q”?

Default, Old, and New

• Default: When you create a YouTube channel, each channel is given a randomly generated string of letters and numbers like this “UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q”, this is like the channel’s Social Security number that is unique to each channel and this is how you are identified by YouTube when you do things on YouTube. You can give this out to anyone, and no one can do anything to you as this does not contain any PII (Personally Identifiable Information), in fact anyone who comes to your channel can find this.
• Old accounts w/ a name: Accounts that do not have the default randomly generated string of letters and numbers like this “UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q”, have opted to get something called a custom name or vanity name like “youtube.com/youtube” as this can be easily typed in and easy to remember unlike the randomly generated one.
• New accounts w/ a name: Just like the old accounts with a name, new accounts can also get a custom name or vanity name however YouTube decided to add something extra that older accounts don’t require and that is typing in a c after youtube.com. Older accounts its just youtube.com/youtube, but new accounts for some reason YouTube requires new accounts to type in the letter c after youtube.com followed by the channel’s custom name or vanity name so your URL looks like this youtube.com/c/youtube.

How to find a channel’s randomly generated string of letters and numbers?

To find the channel’s randomly generated string of letters and numbers, click on any video, then click on the person’s name and you should see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q.

What about YouTube’s nocookie?

You can keep the base URL the same so everything will work, but if you take the base URL https://youtube.com, and add “-nocookie” between youtube and the dot com so the new URL looks like this https://youtube-nocookie.com, what this does is it turns on privacy-enhanced mode. (Here is someone else blog post talking about YouTube’s nocookie and you can also read YouTube/Google’s page about it here.

See the images from the video?

You can see a large image and three small thumbnails from a video regardless if it is privet or public. If the video has been removed this will not work.

• https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ABC123/maxresdefault.jpg (Large image)
• https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ABC123/default.jpg (Small image of the larger image)
• https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ABC123/1.jpg
• https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ABC123/2.jpg
• https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ABC123/3.jpg

Channel link to subscribe

Lets say this is your YouTube channel URL https://www.youtube.com/user/ABC123, if you add ?sub_confirmation=1 to the end of the URL, so the URL will look like this https://www.youtube.com/user/ABC123?sub_confirmation=1, when someone clicks on the URL, they will be taken to your channel and then be asked to subscribe. If you use this link, anyone who clicks on the link will NOT be automatically subscribe, they must click on subscribe or they can chose to click on the x to close the pop-up.

Unofficial YouTube hack site

This site is NOT official for YouTube, but if you are a content creator you can take a look at this site https://youtubehacks.br.gy where the site give some more hacks you can do you use YouTube like a real pro.

You can also see this website goty.br.gy is an unofficial shortcut to YouTube’s official links. Take long URLs and make them short, finds the official short URL and watch shorts in the classic YouTube video player.

Credits/Sources

• The featured image that is used for this post is by Mohamed Hassan (https://pixabay.com/users/mohamed_hassan-5229782) and uploaded to Pixabay witch you can download the image by going to https://pixabay.com/illustrations/youtube-icon-logo-youtube-3249999.