Let’s say your internet research takes you to a video on YouTube with an age restriction. You want to watch it (you know—for research purposes) but you don’t remember your YouTube login information, don’t want the video in your viewing history. Fortunately, there are a few little URL tricks to help with that.
If you remove the watch?v= and replace with embed/, you’ll get a link that goes directly to the video without the rest of the YouTube site—and it’ll play full-width in your browser. So, for example, you would take this link:
youtube.com/watch?v=o5GDrJEGkVk
and change it to this:
youtube.com/embed/o5GDrJEGkVk
And you won’t have to log in. Alternatively, you can add nsfw before the youtube.com portion of the link:
nsfwyoutube.com/watch?v=o5GDrJEGkVk
This will take you to a different site to play the video (and subject you to some ads), but it’s a bit faster to type in. You can accomplish much the same thing by typing repeat into the same spot in the browser bar instead, as follows:
http://repeatyoutube.com/watch?v=o5GDrJEGkVk
This story was originally published in February 2014 and was updated on June 14, 2021 with new links and screenshots and clearer instructions.