Hacking YouTube, here are some cool neat little tricks but you may find to be useful


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.

Hacking the URL

Probably most of us don’t pay really too much attention about the URL on YouTube however the URL on YouTube can be useful by controlling how YouTube responds.

If you want to video a video in full screen but without pressing “F11” for example you can view the video in fill screen by using this URL as seen below:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ABC123? (Note: We will call this URL https://www.youtube.com/embed/ABC123 the base URL, you MUST put question mark if one is not seen at the end of the base URL, so the base URL looks like this https://www.youtube.com/embed/ABC123?, then you can add &mute=1 for example in order for this to work.)

If you add to the URL by adding &autoplay=1, this will allow the video to start playing automatically without having to press play.

If we keep adding to the URL by adding &mute=1, this will tell the video that if played the audio shall be turned off until the user turns the audio on

If we keep adding to the URL by adding &controls=0, This will not show any of the controllers at the bottom however if you do hover over the video you will see the YouTube logo, if you do not move your mouse for a few seconds the YouTube logo will be hidden until you move your mouse again.

If a channel has a live feed that runs all the time, than you can copy this URL https://www.youtube.com/embed/live_stream?channel=ABC123, just remember to replace ABC123 with the channels encrypted name i.e. UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q and if you want to add the more to the URL as we need above you can, just remember to add the question mark at the end then add on to the URL.

How to find a channel’s encrypted URL i.e. UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q?

Some channels can you type in for older channels https://youtube.com/abc123 and newer channels https://youtube.com/c/abc123 witch is a nice URL, and the abc123 is called a vanity URL, but the channels also have what we’re calling a encrypted URL that is like this UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q. To find this encrypted URL click on any video, then click on the person’s name and you should see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrkj450_wAFfjulOTLscQ7Q.

(Note: I want to make sure that I squash any type of conspiracy theory, rumors or anything else that might occur, there is no hidden message in this encrypted URL, that is what I’m calling it. The only thing that it does is to make sure that each channel when it is created they have a unique URL so each one of them is different. It’s basically just randomly generated letters and numbers created by default when the channel is created, when a person reaches a certain amount of subscribers channel alert and then choose something called a vanity URL.)

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 nocokkie 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.

View as your viewer

This can be very helpful to be able to view your own channel as a viewer to see what they see. This can be helpful if your trying to fix an issue.

https://www.youtube.com/user/ABC123/?view_as=subscriber

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.


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