Manually build youtube video link with timestamp

I'm on mobile in the browser on YouTube, not logged in.

Sometimes I want to share the video via link starting from the current playback time.

How to manually build a youtube video link with timestamp?

I know I can switch to Desktop view to get the 'Start at' option on the Share button, but this is too tedious and takes too long.

Add &t=XXs to the URL.

The deciding element in the GET query string is ther parameter t=. The canonical form of its value is XXXs with an s appended after the numeric value for seconds. Other possible forms are converted into this format after page load, so use that for permanent URLs that don't change visibly in the address bar.

The easier form is with minutes followed by the letter m before seconds followed by s, and possibly even hours followed by the letter h before the minutes and seconds, like 2m20s or 1h2m3s.

The shortest form is a pure number like 140 without unit, which implies seconds.

If the URL already contains a query string, like it does for default www.youtube.com and mobile m.youtube.com URLs, you append &t=50s at the end of the URL. Or more precise at the end of the query string, as it could have an anchor part, but probaly won't in normal browsing.

For the shorter youtu.be URLs the video id is part of the path and not of the query string, so you don't append &t=50s but ?t=50s. Where the question mark is the query delimiter at the beginning of the query string and end of the path, instead of the parameter separator ampersand.

Examples