How to resume YouTube videos automatically or manually

Whenever you open a video page on the video hosting site YouTube, it starts to play from the beginning. While that is not an issue if you never opened the video before, it is one if you want to resume a video that you played before.

Update: YouTube seems to have its own resume feature, but it only is available under certain conditions. You need to be signed in, the video you are playing needs to be at least 20 minutes, and you need to have watched at least one minute of it.

Maybe you are watching a lecture or presentation on YouTube and want to resume it at the position you stopped watching the other day. Or you like to watch gaming videos and want to make sure you don't miss any of the action.

Finding the position manually takes time and chance is that you will have to adjust the position slider several times before you can start watching the video again.

It is possible to automate the process but only if you use third-party software, extensions or bookmarklets, to do so.

Google Chrome

There are several extensions available for Google Chrome that provide you with options to resume videos that you have started to watch before on the video hosting site.

Video Resumer works automatically, which means that it will remember the position of any video you watch on YouTube, including embedded videos on third-party websites regardless of how you end playback.

It works if you close the browser window or tab the video is playing in for instance.

The extension makes available two options that you my find useful. It won't remember positions if only five seconds or less of playback are left, and will forget about videos after seven days. These two values can be changed on the options page.

Firefox

Video Resumer for Firefox has been created by the same company that developed the Chrome extension. It offers the same feature set and will resume videos automatically if you stop playback in one way or the other.

The options too are identical so that you can modify them on the options page of the add-on as well to modify them.

Manual option

If you require the service only occasionally, you may not want to install an add-on or browser extension for that.

YouTube supports adding time information to video urls so that videos start playback at the specified point in time.

All you have to do is add &t=4m42s to the video url and replace the m (minutes) and s (seconds) values. Here is a example of how this looks like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zus2Q2RB42Q&t=4m42s

You can then bookmark the video to resume playback at a later point in time.

A service like YouTube Bedtime provides you with the means to create these kind of urls automatically.