YouTube Tips and Tricks

Awesome Progress Bar

Select the video and click type out "awesome" without quotes. The progress bar blinks vibgyor.

Awesome Progress Bar

Play in HTML Format

Add /html5 at the end of any YouTube video URL to make it load as HTML5 which is fast and effective as compared to Flash

Add /html5 to video URL to play as HTML5 video

You can also navigate to https://www.youtube.com/html5 to select it as the default.

Watch in Window Mode

If you replace watch?v= in the URL with v/, you can watch the video in windowed mode and skip having to sign in.

YouTube in Window mode


Keyboard Shortcuts

Don't use the Space Bar to pause a YouTube video. Hit "K" instead to instantly pause it! Similarly use "J" and "L" to jump back and forth by 10 sec respectively in the video. There are the mid-right keys on the keyboard. J-K-L are the standard keys in a video editor software.

J-K-L-Back-Pause-Forward-YouTube-Videos

L will also skip the ads.

If your YouTube video take a long time to load, press the down arrow to turn the loading symbol into a game of Tetris.

C toggles the caption.

Meanwhile M mutes the audio and F makes the video go full screen.

Watching Videos Like a Pro

Set your YouTube bookmark to youtube.com/feed/subscriptions/u . That way you will see the latest videos from the channels you subscribe to and not a bunch of useless recommendations

Every YT channel has a hidden RSS feed, so I used them to make Feedly my Subscription Box. It's a time consuming process but it's well worth the benefits:
  • Videos will ALWAYS show up, unlike in the ever-broken Sub Box.
  • Watched videos will disappear making way for the unwatched
  • Bookmark, "keep unread" or hide videos with one click.
  • Organize your feed into folders (similar to YT's Collections feature, but less convoluted)
  • Know exactly how many unwatched vids you have. Overall and in each folder.
  • Everything loads on one page

YouTube subscriptions on Feedly


If you want to give it a try, all you need is this:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/username/uploads
Replace "username" with the name of the channel you want to subscribe to and paste the string into Feedly's search bar.

1080p on Firefox

HTML5 player may limit the videos to 720p. Try the following setting on Firefox:

  1. Load about:config in the browser's address bar and hit enter.
  2. Confirm that you are careful when the prompt is displayed.
  3. Search for media.mediasource.enabled. If the preference is set to false, you will have to change it to true.
  4. Double-click the preference name to set it to true and enable it.

1080p on Firefox


Remove Distractions, use Feather

Remove all of the distractions from Youtube without a plugin by using https://www.youtube.com/user/feather. It will basically change Youtube to what it was a few years ago, except there are no comments and it will load way faster.

Plugins allow more control. YouTube Options (Chrome) and YouTube Center (FireFox) work well,

Latch to Faster CDNs

Enter the following command into Windows cmd prompt (start->run->"cmd"):
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FASTYOUTUBE" dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
This adds a firewall rule to reject certain CDN IP addresses, which in turn gets you a very blazing fast streaming.
To remove the firewall rule use the following command:
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="FASTYOUTUBE"

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