How to Use This Tool
Hit Share on a YouTube video and you get a link with a tail of parameters attached. Most of them do nothing for the person you send it to, and two of them actively change what they see.
What each parameter is
v— the video id. The only genuinely required part.si— a share identifier added automatically since 2023. It ties the click back to the share that produced it. Dropping it changes nothing about playback.pp— an encoded blob of playback and referrer context. Also unnecessary.listandindex— these do something. They drop the viewer into a playlist at a given position, so a “next video” appears that you did not intend to recommend. This is the one worth removing deliberately.t— a start time in seconds. Useful when you mean it, confusing when it is left over from where you happened to pause.feature,ab_channel,utm_*— attribution. Safe to drop.
si is a privacy nicety. Removing list is the one that changes what the recipient actually experiences.The three output forms
youtube.com/watch is the canonical form and the one to use in writing.
youtu.be is shortest, which matters in a character-limited post, and is officially
supported. embed is the form an <iframe> needs; pasting a watch URL into
an iframe does not work and is a very common mistake.
youtube-nocookie.com
Ticking that box switches an embed to YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain, which defers most cookie setting until the viewer actually presses play. It is not full privacy — requests still reach Google and some storage is still used — but it is meaningfully better than the default and is the right choice for any embed on a site with EEA or UK visitors. Do not describe it to your users as “no tracking”, because that is not what it does.
Shorts links
A Shorts URL and a normal watch URL point at the same video with the same id, so the tool converts
between them. Sending someone the /shorts/ form forces the vertical full-screen player;
the /watch?v= form opens the standard one. That is a genuine choice rather than a cleanup, so
it is left to the output-form buttons rather than done automatically.
Nothing is fetched
The tool parses the text of the URL and never contacts YouTube. It therefore cannot tell you whether a video exists, is private or has been removed — that would require a request, and a request would mean sending your links somewhere. Everything here happens in your browser.
