For all its faults as a platform, YouTube’s video player functionality is easily among the best online. It streams reliably to almost every device you can think of, in your choice of both video quality and playback speed. But it’s the array of hidden features and interface tricks that push it over the edge for me. (Other video players, take note.) Here are 10 of my favorite hacks that make YouTube easier to use.
Search YouTube video transcripts with Ctrl-F
Almost every video on YouTube either has an official or auto-generated subtitled track. While these are mainly used for captioning, you can also pull up this transcript on the web and use Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F on Macs) to search for keywords in a video and jump straight to the part you want to see.
This feature has been around for a while, but YouTube has shuffled around where to find the transcript from time to time. As of this writing, the most reliable way to find it is to open the video’s description, scroll to the bottom, and click Show transcript to open it up in a side bar.
Set a sleep timer for long videos
Four hour video essays and ASMR streams can be great background noise to help you fall asleep. However, if you want to avoid getting jolted awake by that one really loud joke you forgot about, you can set a sleep timer to pause any video after a certain amount of time.
On web or mobile, click the Settings icon on any given video and choose Sleep timer (on mobile, it may be under Settings > More). You can choose a timer ranging from 10 to 60 minutes. You can also automatically pause once the current video is over, which is helpful if you usually have auto-play enabled.
Link to specific timestamps in a video
One of YouTube’s handiest features is the ability to deep-link to a specific second of any video, like I did in the last section. There are several ways to get a precise timestamp link. If you’re on the web, you can right click a video and choose “Copy video URL at current time.” And on mobile, when you click the Share icon, you can tap the toggle next to the timestamp to add the precise link.
If none of those are options, you can even create your own timestamp link. At the end of any video URL, add “&t=01h05m47s”, replacing the numbers with the specific time you want to link to. You can use any combination of hours, minutes, and seconds to specify the point in the video you want.
Use arrow keys or double-taps for quick navigation
Most video players at this point have some kind of “Hang on, what did they just say?” button that lets you skip 5-10 seconds backward or forward. YouTube has several. The most straightforward, on mobile, is the double-tap. Tap twice on the left side of the screen to go backwards 10 seconds, and on the right to go forward. Keep tapping to move forward or back by further increments of 10 seconds.
On the web, you have even finer grain control. You can use the left and right arrow keys to move 5 seconds back and forth. Alternatively, you can use the J-K-L keys to move in 10 second increments (with K being used to pause the video). This latter method is borrowed from video editors, making it a handy way to keep your muscle memory consistent if you do a lot of editing.
Move frame-by-frame with keyboard shortcuts
YouTubers love putting walls of text in a single frame of a video that you have to pause to be able to read. On mobile, the only way to read these–or examine any specific frame–is to back up and try to time your pause perfectly. On the web, however, there’s a better way. While paused on a video, you can press the , (comma) or . (period) keys to move back or forward exactly one frame at a time. You can hold these keys down to slowly move through frames as well.
Quickly fast-forward with a long-press
It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that you can play YouTube videos at 2x (or higher) speed, but what if you only want to rush through a small part of a video, like an ad read? On the mobile version of YouTube, there’s a handy gesture to do just that, without changing your default playback speed.
Simply long-press and hold anywhere on the video while it’s playing. This will temporarily cause the video to play back at 2x speed, until you lift your finger. If you’re already watching at 2x or higher, it won’t play any faster (or slower) than your current speed, though.
Set your video quality defaults
YouTube generally does a pretty good job of automatically deciding what video quality to stream at, balancing fidelity with bandwidth demands. You can manually override this on a per-video basis, but on mobile, you have a few more options to get broader control.
In the YouTube mobile app, head to Settings > Quality. Here, you can set separate quality defaults for video when you’re streaming over mobile networks or wifi, as well as audio quality. The latter is particularly helpful if you use YouTube for listening to music or podcasts. If your wifi is reliably fast, it can be worth it to set higher quality defaults, rather than manually change each video’s resolution whenever you notice the quality looks degraded.
Use incognito mode to preserve your suggestions
YouTube can get overly eager to show you videos even vaguely similar to one you watched before. If you’d rather not get a feed full of videos on how to fix a door, you can use an incognito tab to browse without contributing to your algorithm’s history. It’s a little tougher on mobile, but fortunately the YouTube app has an option for that.
In the mobile YouTube app, navigate to the You tab. Along the top of the screen, tap “Turn on incognito.” This will let you search and browse without any algorithmic recommendations or contributing to your history. You can manually turn off incognito mode, or it will automatically turn off after 90 minutes of inactivity. Note, if you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, none of your benefits will apply while you’re browsing incognito.
Remove unwanted videos from your history
If you forget to turn on incognito mode, you can still remove videos from your browsing history so they won’t muck up your recommendations. To do this, head to your YouTube history on mobile or the web, tap the three-dot menu next to the video in question, and choose “Remove from watch history.”
This is usually enough to prevent a video from becoming the algorithm’s latest fixation, but it also means you won’t be able to find the video in your history again. If you want provide any kind of direct feedback, like a thumbs down or a report, make sure to do that first. Otherwise, if you navigate to the video again, it will be re-added to your history.
Master even more keyboard shortcuts
Beyond basic navigation, YouTube on the web has a plethora of helpful keyboard shortcuts that you might never encounter that are worth knowing about. Some of them are pretty niche, but you never know when they can come in handy:
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Up and Down arrows: Turn the volume on a video up or down in 5% increments.
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Shift+> and Shift+<:> Speed up or slow down the current video playback speed
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M: Mute the current video.
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F: Enter/exit fullscreen mode.
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T: Enter/exit Theater mode
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Shift+N: Play the next video in your queue or playlist.
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Shift+P: Play the previous video in your queue or playlist.
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Ctrl/Cmd+Left or Right arrow keys: Navigate to the next or previous chapter in a video.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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