YouTube Video ID Extractor

What a video ID is

Every YouTube video has an ID of exactly 11 characters drawn from 64 symbols: upper- and lowercase letters, digits, -, and _. IDs are case-sensitive, so dQw4w9WgXcQ and dqw4w9wgxcq are different videos, and they are random rather than sequential, so an ID says nothing about when a video was uploaded or who made it.

The ID is the one part of a link that stays fixed while everything around it changes: the same ID appears in watch, share, Shorts, and embed links, and in the thumbnail and API addresses built from it.

Links that have no video ID

Channel links (/@handle, /channel/UC…), playlist links without a v= parameter, and search result pages do not name a single video, so there is nothing to extract. A channel ID is also a different thing: 24 characters starting with UC.

When a link that plays in the browser is rejected, look for text copied along with it: a trailing bracket or full stop from a chat message, or two links pasted together. To see every part of a link, including its playlist and start time, use the YouTube URL parser.

How to use it

1. Paste a YouTube URL or video ID.
2. Choose Build result.
3. Copy the normalized video ID.

Privacy & limitations

Parsing happens entirely in your browser. The URL is not opened or sent to TOEA or YouTube.