YouTube – Direct link to subtitles
and HD quality
April 9th, 2009
I was really overwhelmed by the success of my movie “History of the Internet”.
I never believed in such a success. Here I want to thank all the people, who made subtitles for the movie. The clip has already 11 subtitles, which can be selected on YouTube. I asked myself how to start the clip, with a certain subtitle, by a direct URL. After looking around for a while I found that piece “hl=en” in the URL, which is the key to this problem.
Subtitles
&hl=en
By adding for example “&hl=en” to the URL, you can launch the movie directly with English subtitles. For those, who don´t know it, “en” is an code from the ISO 639.1 language code list. By changing the code you can directly link to the other subtitles.
Full-screen
&fs=1
&fs=1 means full-screen enabled. If you want to change that you can turn 1 to 0
High Definition
&fmt=22
And here is the best and also the most popular part in a YouTube URL. By adding “&fmt=22″ you can launch a clip in HD (720p)
Here is a list of all subtitled versions of the clip “History of the Internet”
Bulgarian (by Andrian Georgiev)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=bg&fs=1&fmt=22
(Doesn´t work as direct link yet.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=zh-CN&fs=1&fmt=22
(Here you have to add “-CN” for China to the language code)
English (by Stefan Badragan)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22
French (by Arnaud ‘dehy’ DE MOUHY)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=fr&fs=1&fmt=22
German (by me)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=de&fs=1&fmt=22
Greek (by Pantelis Bouboulis)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=el&fs=1&fmt=22
(Doesn´t work as direct link yet.)
Italian (by Stefan Badragan)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=it&fs=1&fmt=22
Polish (by Agnieszka Marciniak)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=pl&fs=1&fmt=22
Portuguese (by Guilherme Euler)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=pt&fs=1&fmt=22
Spanish (by Mauricio Diaz Orlich)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=es&fs=1&fmt=22
Turkish (by Zeynep Can)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&hl=tr&fs=1&fmt=22
(Doesn´t work as direct link yet.)
If you have tips why these three subtitles don´t work, please post it as comment. Maybe I´m wrong with the language codes.
Update: Maybe this link can help you, too.
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April 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Hi, great blog,
interesting article,
The system for the fullscreen mode(&fs=1) doesn’t work for me in Belgium…
The HD link (&fmt=22) and subtitles code work fine.
April 9th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Hi Fran thanks for your compliments
(&fs=1) doesn´t mean that it starts in fullscreen mode. It means that the viewer can switch to full screen mode if he likes. If you turn it to zero this function will be enabled. Maybe that´s the problem. Sorry for making you think it will start in full-screen mode if you thought so.
April 10th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Oh, argh, shame on me, I misunderstood and really think videos starts in fullscreen mode, it’ll be fun to can do that, thanks for your answer and long life for this blog, I really enjoy it.
Fran.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Hi again,
After some searches, I find a way to start directly youtube videos in HQ without clicking the HQ button just with (&fmt=18) at the end of the URL, your tip with the (&fmt=22) works fine for HD even sadly videos never start directly in HD, it’s maybe useless, but I thought it’ll be good to share that.
–– this part deleted. sorry –
Hope you’ll like.
Cheers from belgium.
Fran.
April 19th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Hi Fran,
nice for sharing the direct download link (in the second part of your comment), but I´m sorry to delete it, because linking to such sites is illegal
I hope you respect that.
Cheers,
Melih
November 10th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Hi,
Thanks for this amazing article. I almost lost hope, untill I found this one.
Just one problem left:
It’s very important that the video starts in the Youtube- and subtitle language without a click. Because if you do it now, and you have your YouTube in English and you want it to be Italian. YOu have to click at “YouTube in Italiano” in the upper blew line above your video.
Do we have some kind of code to avoid this step?
CHeers,
Brett
November 10th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I think that it don´t works anymore
It think now it just works if you embed the clip. And add “&cc_load_policy=1” to the URLs in the embed-code.
For example:
http://www.youtube.com/v/9hIQjrMHTv4&fs=1&cc_load_policy=1&hl=it
Let´s test it — the video should start in with Italian subtitles now. But it´s sad that the viewer has to activate the subs:
Also watch this article:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=140174
November 18th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Also watch this link http://muzso.hu/2010/11/13/youtube-%E2%80%93-direct-link-to-subtitles-and-hd-quality
February 10th, 2012 at 12:26 am
I will immediately grab your rss as I can not in finding your e-mail subscription link or e-newsletter service. Do you’ve any? Kindly allow me understand so that I may subscribe. Thanks.
February 10th, 2012 at 10:37 am
I don´t hava a e-mail subscription link. Just subscribe to the RSS-Feed