Paste any YouTube URL and extract the 11-character Video ID in one click. Works with all URL formats — watch, Shorts, embeds, and youtu.be links.
Paste URL → Get 11-character Video ID instantly
youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_IDyoutu.be/VIDEO_IDyoutube.com/embed/VIDEO_IDyoutube.com/shorts/VIDEO_IDyoutube.com/v/VIDEO_IDyoutube.com/e/VIDEO_IDhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ for a solid minute before I figured out that dQw4w9WgXcQ was the part I actually needed. It felt obvious in hindsight, but in the moment it wasn't — and that's why I built this tool.
Every video uploaded to YouTube gets a unique identifier — an 11-character string made up of letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens. This string appears in the video's URL and is how YouTube's entire platform internally refers to that specific video. It's the same regardless of which URL format you use to access the video — whether you go through the full watch URL, a short youtu.be link, an embed, or a Shorts URL, the underlying ID is always the same 11 characters.
For example, the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ contains the Video ID dQw4w9WgXcQ. That same video can also be reached at https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ — same ID, different URL format. The ID is the stable, permanent identifier that never changes even if the video title, description, or thumbnail is updated.
YouTube Video IDs are always exactly 11 characters long. They use a Base64-like character set — uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, hyphens, and underscores. This gives YouTube over 73 trillion possible unique identifiers, which is why they haven't run out despite billions of videos being uploaded since the platform launched in 2005.
The whole process takes about five seconds. Here's exactly what to do:
Go to any YouTube video. Copy the URL from your browser's address bar — or right-click the video and select "Copy video URL". The full URL, the short youtu.be link, a Shorts link — any format works.
Paste the URL into the input field above and click "Extract Video ID". The tool parses the URL in milliseconds and pulls out the 11-character Video ID from wherever it appears in the URL string.
Click "Copy ID" to copy the Video ID to your clipboard. Use it in your YouTube API calls, embed code, custom player, or anywhere else that needs a raw Video ID rather than a full URL.
More often than most people realize. Here are the real situations where having the raw Video ID matters:
The YouTube API requires a Video ID — not a full URL — to retrieve video data. Whether you're fetching view counts, video metadata, captions, or statistics, every API call to the videos.list endpoint needs the raw ID passed as the id parameter.
If you're building a custom video player or embedding YouTube videos with specific parameters — autoplay, start time, playlist, loop — you need the Video ID to construct the embed URL manually rather than using YouTube's generic embed code.
Video analytics platforms, content dashboards, and social media monitoring tools often ask for Video IDs rather than full URLs. When tracking engagement across multiple videos in a spreadsheet or database, the 11-character ID is a much cleaner identifier than a full URL.
YouTube's thumbnail CDN URLs are constructed using the Video ID. Once you have the ID, you can directly access any video's thumbnail at multiple resolutions — default, medium, high, standard, and maxres — without any API call or authentication.
Building a youtu.be short link, a timestamp-specific link, or a playlist link all require the Video ID as the base. If you need to generate multiple custom links for the same video with different parameters, starting from the raw ID is far cleaner than parsing a full URL each time.
Many CMS platforms, website builders, and blog systems store YouTube Video IDs rather than full URLs in their database. When migrating content, building content feeds, or importing video libraries, you often need to batch-extract IDs from URL lists.
Once you have the Video ID, here's what you can actually do with it across the most common use cases:
<!-- Standard YouTube embed -->
<iframe
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID"
frameborder="0"
allowfullscreen>
</iframe># Different quality thumbnails:
https://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/default.jpg # 120×90
https://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/mqdefault.jpg # 320×180
https://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/hqdefault.jpg # 480×360
https://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/maxresdefault.jpg # 1280×720GET https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos
?part=snippet,statistics
&id=VIDEO_ID
&key=YOUR_API_KEYHandles watch URLs, youtu.be short links, embed URLs, Shorts, and the legacy /v/ and /e/ formats — the regex covers every YouTube URL pattern in active use.
Extraction happens on the server using PHP regex — not JavaScript. This means it works even if your browser has scripts disabled, and the result persists on page refresh.
The Copy button uses the Clipboard API for instant copy. The button text changes to "Copied ✓" for 2 seconds to confirm the action, then resets automatically.
After extraction, the result panel shows ready-to-use URL formats — embed URL, short link, and API parameter string — so you don't have to construct them yourself.
We never log, store, or process the URLs you paste. The extraction is stateless — once you leave the page, nothing about your session is retained on our server.
The tool works perfectly on iPhone and Android. Paste a URL from YouTube's mobile share sheet, tap Extract, and copy the ID — the whole workflow is optimized for touch.
youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID, and our extractor handles this format natively. The Video ID in a Shorts URL is the same 11-character identifier used for the regular watch URL version of the video — they're the same video, just displayed differently on the platform.v= parameter (meaning a specific video is active in the playlist), the Video ID will be extracted successfully. If the URL points only to a playlist with no specific video selected, there's no Video ID to extract — only a Playlist ID, which starts with "PL" and is longer than 11 characters. This tool does not extract Playlist IDs.https://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/QUALITY.jpg. Replace VIDEO_ID with your extracted ID and QUALITY with one of: default (120×90), mqdefault (320×180), hqdefault (480×360), or maxresdefault (1280×720). Note that maxresdefault may not exist for older or lower-resolution videos — hqdefault is the most consistently available.(?:youtu\.be\/|youtube\.com\/(?:watch\?(?:.*&)?v=|embed\/|shorts\/))([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11}). Apply this to each URL in your list and collect the capture group from each match.