Youtube Tips, Tricks and Hidden Features

Youtube Tips, Tricks and Hidden Features

YouTube, the extremely popular video sharing website by Google averaging more than 3 billion page views per day needs no introduction to its fans who spend a considerable amount of time watching and sharing videos. While most of these users know every nook and corner of this website, there are some features that are hidden deep within, in a manner that only few of the most experienced users seem to know about them. This article contains some such features, tips and tricks.

YouTube Tips, Tricks and Features

YouTube MySpeed

Are YouTube videos taking too much time to load on your internet connection? Visit theYouTube MySpeed page to find your video streaming speed and compare it with the average speed of your ISP, your city, your state, your country and the world.

YouTube Disco

YouTube is all set to replace your music players with YouTube Disco. This music discovery project allows you to find the videos of your choice, create a list of them and then easily watch them without having the need to choose a new video after the one you are watching is finished.

YouTube Snakes Easter egg

You can play the classic Snakes game while watching any video in your browser. Just pause and resume a video, hold the left arrow key for 2 seconds and while still holding it, press the Up arrow key. This only works in the new YouTube player on videos played on YouTube.com.

YouTube Editor

Do you edit your videos before uploading them to YouTube? Now, you don’t need to because it lets you to do all of that online with YouTube Editor; well not all of that but it at least lets you combine, trim and rotate videos. The best part about YouTube Editor is that it allows you to find copyright free music that you can add to your videos. It also offers some comparably advanced features like stabilizing shaky videos and inserting transitions.

YouTube Leanback

YouTube lets you watch the videos of your choice but have you ever wanted to just sit back and enjoy watching videos just like you watch television? YouTube Leanback can help. YouTube Leanback plays high quality full screen videos tailored to your choices (if you are signed in to your Google account). If you are not signed in, you can choose a category to watch videos from, watch featured videos and even search for the video of your choice. You can then connect your TV to your computer to seamlessly enjoy TV, YouTube style.

YouTube XL

While you can enjoy videos on your TV using Leanback, the interface is far from desirable. So, to allow users on smart TVs browse videos more effectively, YouTube has an XL version for large screen sizes. This version does not have comments and other unimportant stuff that you see in the standard version.

Set default video playback quality

Are you annoyed at manually changing the quality of every YouTube video you watch? Now you don’t need to, because YouTube has an option that automatically lets you select the quality of videos you see. If you have a slow connection, you can select the option of never playing high quality videos. You can also select the option of showing captions and annotations automatically.

Watch Videos blocked in your country : URL trick

If the URL of the video that is blocked in your country is youtube.com/watch?v={video-id}, you can access it by going to youtube.com/v/{video-id}. As an additional advantage, you will be able to view the video at the full size of your browser window.

Link to a specific time in a video

If you want to link to a video at a specific time, you can add #t=XXs to the URL where XX is a variable which represents the number of seconds after which the video will start.

YouTube Live

YouTube Live lets you find all live broadcasts available. You can also see a list of videos that are scheduled to be broadcasted at a later date.

Create a feed of almost anything on YouTube

Just go to the YouTube Data API page and build a custom feed for yourself. However, there is a problem with the URI generated for specific categories as “{http://gdata.youtube.com/ schemas/ 2007/ categories.cat}” is also added. Remove this and the URI is good to go.

YouTube Charts

Want to find the best videos on YouTube? Use YouTube Charts to find what other users are watching, discussing and favoring. You can select a particular category to determine the best videos in that particular category. You can even filter videos to determine what has been popular this week, this month or this year. You also have the option to play all the videos obtained in results.

Legally Watch Full Length Movies and TV Shows on YouTube

YouTube has a dedicated page to allow users to watch full-length ad supported movies for free. Movies are classified based on their genre and are offered in full HD quality. Movies are uploaded by the creators for the purpose of creating another source of revenue for themselves as Google gives them a portion of the advertising revenue. A similar page exists for TV shows.

YouTube Feather Beta

Love browsing videos but are on a terribly slow connection? Feather, the new experimental feature to allow users on slow connections enjoy YouTube might help you. It achieves this by serving the lowest amount of data to a user. Naturally, this means removal of several features that don’t add much value. Feather is currently available only as an opt-in service which allows you to opt out anytime you want.