YouTube Video ID Finder — Get the 11-Character ID
Turn any YouTube link form into the 11-character video ID.
Quick answer: Paste any YouTube URL — watch, youtu.be, Shorts, live, embed, /v/, or a link with extra tracking parameters — and this tool returns the 11-character video ID inside it, along with canonical watch, embed, Shorts and thumbnail links you can copy. A bare ID pasted in is accepted too, so it works as a validator as well as an extractor.
| ID shape | 11 characters from A–Z, a–z, 0–9, hyphen and underscore |
|---|---|
| Link forms understood | watch?v= · youtu.be/ · /shorts/ · /live/ · /embed/ · /v/ · raw ID |
| Output | The ID plus canonical watch, embed, Shorts and thumbnail URLs |
| Use cases | Embedding, the YouTube Data API, lookups, deduplicating links |
What this tool does
Every YouTube video has one identifier, and every link style is a wrapper around it. When you need to embed a video, call an API, check whether two links point at the same video, or build a thumbnail URL by hand, the first step is always the same: extract those eleven characters.
Common uses
- Deduplicate a list of links that use different URL shapes
- Get an ID to feed the YouTube Data API or an embed snippet
- Check two links point at the same video before deleting one
- Build thumbnail and oEmbed URLs by hand
- Validate an ID you copied from somewhere else
Forms that trip people up
Three shapes cause most failures. First, the Shorts and live paths place the ID after a keyword — /shorts/«id» and /live/«id» — rather than in a query string. Second, short links from the mobile app arrive as youtu.be/«id»?si=… with a tracking parameter that must not be mistaken for the ID. Third, playlists and channel pages contain no single video ID at all; a playlist link with &v= inside does contain one, and this tool will surface it, but the surrounding list is not part of the answer.