YouTube Tips
Here is some helpful tips for text in descriptions, posts and comments within YouTube.
Chapters
Chapter markers in video descriptions will populate the seek bar while comments will make hot links to the position in the video.
Chapter markers
When making chapter markers use the following format.
You must start the first line with 00:00
00:00 Prologue
02:00 Beginning
10:00 Climax
15:00 Outro
20:00 Epilogue
Chapter markers more than one hour
You must start the first line with 00:00:00
00:00:00 Prologue
00:02:00 Beginning
00:46:00 Climax
01:00:00 1 Hour
02:00:00 2 Hours
02:15:00 Outro
02:20:00 Epilogue
Text Formating
Some very basic formatting is available in YouTube.
Style
Put text within asterisks, underlines or hyphens for the following effect. They can be combined but if the text uncluding URLs have these characters as part of the sentence it may not work.
*bold*
_italics_
-strike-though-
These work everywhere (descriptions, comments and posts).
Title and Heading
These work on video descriptions only.
Make sure to have a space after the hash or it will become a hashtag.
# Title
## Heading
### Sub heading
These work in video descriptions only.
Hyperlinks
If you have Advanced features enabled you can have URLs turn into hyperlinks in video descriptions. Hyperlinks will also work in posts and comments even if you don't have advanced features.
Closing brackets
YouTube does not create hyperlinks correctly if the last character of the URL is a closing bracket. I found this issue when linking to Wikipedia pages.
For example we will use this URL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV1_(Australian_TV_channel)
YouTube will make it a hyperlink like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV1_(Australian_TV_channel)
Notice the hyperlink does not include the last character, when we navigate with it Wikipedia shows a different page.
To fix this use %29 at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV1_(Australian_TV_channel%29
becomes