YouTube's Pages for Blogs

Philippe Lagane spotted a new YouTube feature: a special page that lists the most recent videos embedded by a blog. The page includes short snippets from the blog posts and allows you to play all the videos and add them to a playlist.


A Google search for [site:youtube.com/social/blog] returns about 40 results, but it's likely that all the blogs indexed by Google will be included. The new pages could become an alternative to channels for blogs that embed content from other publishers.

YouTube already has a section titled "popular around the Web" that includes the most viewed videos embedded on other websites and shows messages like "As seen on: engadget.com" next to the videos.

{ Thanks, Philippe. }

Creative Commons Videos on YouTube

YouTube added a new feature that lets you change the standard video licensing and switch to the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows other people to reuse your videos. "Others may copy, distribute and create derivative works from your video — but only if they give you credit."


The new feature is used in YouTube's video editor, which lets you search for Creative Commons videos and use them to create a new video. YouTube says that there are already more than 10,000 videos from organizations like C-SPAN and Al Jazeera, but that's just the beginning.


YouTube will certainly become the largest library of Creative Commons videos, but it's strange to see that it took so long to add a license that encourages creativity. The first Google service that integrated with Creative Commons was Google Web Search (2005) and it was followed by Picasa Web Albums (2008) and Google Image Search (2009).

If you want to find Creative Commons videos on YouTube, click "Filter & Explore" after performing a search and select "Creative Commons". You could also add ", creativecommons" to your query and search for [paris, creativecommons].

YouTube Reactions

YouTube tests a new feature that allows users to express their reactions without posting silly comments. They can just click one of the six buttons (LOL, OMG, EPIC, CUTE, WTF, FAIL) and instantly tag the video.



YouTube already highlights tags that use Internet slag words ("#LOL", "#FAIL", "#CUTE") from the comments and places links to a list of comment search results.


Blogger has a similar feature, but blog authors can edit the list of reactions. "With Reactions, readers can easily respond with one click, increasing feedback on posts."

{ Thanks, Ron. }

Playlists in YouTube's Drop Down Menu

YouTube's drop down menu at the top of the page now includes a list of all your playlists and makes it easier to access your favorite videos, your liked videos and the videos added to the "Watch later" playlist.


"You will now see a different set up when you click on your username in the upper right hand corner of any page. In addition to showing the same links to access your Account, My Videos, etc. you will be able to click on thumbnails to automatically load your playlists, Liked, Favorites, and Watch Later lists. The songs in your playlists will be accessible in the strip across the bottom of your screen -- so you can easily navigate to different videos in the playlist you are watching," explained a Google employee.

Another way to access your playlists is to expand the small bar displayed at the bottom of the page, click "Options" and select "Load a different playlist".

{ Thanks, Andrew. }

YouTube's New Search Options Format

YouTube has a new interface for related searches and advanced search options. Now you can select multiple filters from a category and combine related searches. For example, you can find long-form HD videos that are available in the WebM format.

If you click on one of the queries from the "Explore" section, you'll replace the original query. A more interesting option is to mouse over a query and click the "plus" icon: this way, you'll refine your original search.

YouTube adds both filters and refinements to the query and separates them by comma. A search for [slow motion, hd, webm, high speed camera] includes two filters that are treated separately: "hd" and "webm".

You can also add the name of a channel (example: [slow motion, @tpsfilmstudio]) or the name of a category (example: [slow motion, sports]).


The new features were part of an experiment called YouTube Topics that tried to help users find videos. "We know that sometimes people come to YouTube looking for a specific video, but at other times, they have only a rough idea of the kind of videos they want."

HTTPS YouTube

After Google enabled by default encrypted connections to Picasa Web Albums, it started to become obvious that all Google services will soon switch to HTTPS. Probably the most unlikely candidate for this change is YouTube, Google's biggest bandwidth hog, but the unexpected happened: go to a random video and you'll notice that all the resources use HTTPS.


YouTube API's blog has recently announced HTTPS support for embedded videos. "We're planning a gradual expansion of HTTPS across other aspects of the site. The first place you may see HTTPS YouTube URLs is in our various embed codes, all of which currently support HTTPS in addition to the standard HTTP. Anyone can try HTTPS with YouTube embeds today—simply change the protocol portion of the URL from http to https." You can also enable "use HTTPS" when you generate the embedding code.


The performance doesn't seem to be affected and, if everything goes well, YouTube will probably switch to HTTPS in the coming months.

YouTube Comment Threading

YouTube has a new option that lets you group comments and their replies. It's called "sort by thread" and it's only available if you click "see all" next to the number of comments. The option is useful if you read a reply to a comment, but you can't find the initial comment. Here's an example.

Sterling, a reader who noticed this feature, says that "the comments on YouTube are a mess, so confusing, but it looks like YouTube is testing threaded comments on the site. I wish this feature was in the watchpage, but it only shows up in the All comments page."


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

New YouTube Homepage

Last month, YouTube tested a new homepage with many useful features. The new homepage is now available to everyone. The list of new features hasn't changed, even though some of them have been slightly tweaked:

* Combined list - Merges your subscriptions, friend activity, and recommendations into one easier-to-scan list
* Don't miss a video - If a channel uploads 4 videos in a day, you'll see all 4 - instead of just the latest video
* Delete anything - Hover over any video you don't want to watch and click 'x'
* Or just grey it out - Videos you've already watched will be greyed out - so even without deleting, you'll know where you left off
* Help me re-find stuff I just watched - Your homepage will include your recent likes and favorites so you can easily get back to them
* Easy inbox - Links to your inbox (personal messages & comments) are front and center
* Load much more - Watch older videos - all without leaving the homepage

If you don't like the combined view, click on "subscription uploads" at the top of the page to only see the latest videos from your favorite channels. Unfortunately, the homepage is no longer customizable, so you can't hide the sections you don't use.

Drag and Drop Uploading for YouTube Videos

Why download YouTube videos when it's so easy to upload videos? Now you can drag and drop multiple videos on YouTube's upload page instead of using the operating system's file open dialog. The new feature requires a recent version of Google Chrome and Firefox because it uses HTML5 APIs.

Two other Google services that support drag and drop uploading are Gmail and Google Docs, but other services will probably follow suit.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

YouTube's HTML5 Rickrolling

YouTube's HTML5 interface has a very cool feature: if you right-click on a video, you'll no longer see the boring contextual menu displayed by the browser that added uninteresting features like downloading videos. Instead, you'll get a much more useful menu that sends you to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" video.

Some would say that this trick reminds them of the sites that annoyed users by disabling browser features like the contextual menu so that people can't save an image or copy some text. But that's not what happens here: YouTube's terms of use forbid users from downloading videos and the new menu solves this issue by offering a better option. After all, why download a video when you can listen to Rick Astley's fabulous song?


There are at least two uncivil browsers (Firefox and Opera) that treat videos just like images and allow users to right-click on a video and download it. Firefox even lets you disable custom contextual menus for all sites, while Opera provides more granular options. There's even a developer that breached YouTube's terms of use by creating a Greasemonkey script with a strange name: Youtube HTML5 Beta "Save Video As" Unrickroller. Apparently, he lost his sense of humor or he's not a Rick Astley fan.

I'm not going to use any of these features and I'll switch to Internet Explorer, a browser that doesn't offer a download option for videos (mostly because it doesn't support HTML5 videos). Whenever I want to download a YouTube video, I'll ignore all those scripts and tricks and I'll read YouTube's terms of use, while listening to Rick Astley's song. They're a perfect match.

"... You know the rules and so do I ..."

A Collection of YouTube Error Pages

For some reason, reading a message like "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Warner Music Group. Sorry about that." when trying to watch a YouTube video is no longer disconcerting. YouTube's new error pages are so endearing and quirky that you'll forget you can't watch certain videos. They remind me of Chrome's sad tab and Apple's sad Mac or sad iPod icon.

YouTube's Watch Later Feature

YouTube's embedded player has a new feature that lets you add a video to a special playlist and watch it later. This only works for the videos embedded using the new iframe-based code.



After clicking on "watch later", the video is added to your homepage, so you can quickly find it.


It's not very useful for Read it Later or Instapaper fans, but everyone else will probably enjoy the new feature. What's surprising is that YouTube doesn't add the videos to the queue, which is "a list of videos to watch later in your session".

{ Thanks, Stefan. }

YouTube's Homepage Experiment

YouTube tests a new version of its homepage that adds many useful features:

Combined list - Merges your subscriptions, friend activity, and recommendations into one easier-to-scan list
Don't miss a video - If a channel uploads 4 videos in a day, you'll see all 4 - instead of just the latest video
Delete anything - Hover over any video you don't want to watch and click 'x'
Or just grey it out - Videos you've already watched will be greyed out - so even without deleting, you'll know where you left off
Help me re-find stuff I just watched - Your homepage will include your recent likes and favorites so you can easily get back to them
Easy inbox - Links to your inbox (personal messages & comments) are front and center
Load much more - Watch older videos - all without leaving the homepage

YouTube wants to create a more comprehensive newsfeed that includes your actions and all the actions shared by your subscriptions and friends. Unfortunately, the homepage is no longer customizable.

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

It's Easier to Link to a YouTube Timestamp

Linking to a specific timestamp of a YouTube video is not a new feature: you only need to append #t=1m30s or #t=90s to a YouTube URL to skip the first 89 seconds of the video (here's an example).

Now you no longer have to manually add the special parameter to the URL. Just right-click on the video and select "Copy video URL at current time". It's probably a good idea to pause the video before using this feature.

Link to a YouTube Comment

If you happen to find a YouTube comment that's really interesting and you want to share it with other people, mouse over the comment, click on the "Share" button and copy the link.


Each YouTube comment has a permalink, but it's not easy to notice that the comment is displayed below the video in a special section titled "Linked Comment".


You could also use this feature to annotate a video before sharing it with your friends. Post a comment, copy the link and use it to highlight your comment.

YouTube's Playlist Bar Strikes Back

YouTube's playlist bar that shows up at the bottom of the page when you open a playlist or you click on a video from your subscriptions has a new use: displaying the list of liked videos after clicking on the "like" button. It's also used to display the videos from a playlist after adding a new video to the playlist. Unfortunately, this isn't very useful, the bar is annoying and it can slow down your browser. If you have hundreds of liked videos, adding all of them to the bar takes a while and the browser is no longer responsive.

Many YouTube users complain about this new feature: "Starting today, whenever I like a video, a bar pops up at the bottom of the page to tell me it was added to liked videos (a reminder that I don't need) - and then that bar freezes my browser and I can only close it with ctrl+alt+delete."

YouTube should fix the bugs and add an option to disable the bar. You can report this problem by clicking on "report a bug" at the bottom of the page.


{ Thanks, Sterling. }

More Keyboard Shortcuts for YouTube's Seek Bar

Here's a cool tip from a Reddit user: you can press 1 to jump to 10% into the video, 2 if you want to jump to 20%, 3 for 30% and so on. If you press 0, you'll go back to the beginning of the video. You don't have to watch the video on YouTube's site, the trick works even for embedded videos. An important note: don't use the numeric pad.


YouTube offers many other useful shortcuts:
* left/right arrow - seek backward/forward 5 seconds
* ctrl+left/ctrl+right - seek backward/forward 10%
* home/end - seek to the beginning/last seconds of the video
* spacebar - play/pause when the seek bar is selected

Here's a video you can use to try the shortcuts (make sure that the seek bar has focus by clicking on the small play button):

{ via The Next Web. Thanks, Kevin. }

YouTube's HTML5 Player Trial

YouTube might default to the the HTML5 player even if you haven't enabled the experimental feature. If you're using a supported browser (the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE9 beta, Firefox 4 beta), YouTube could test the new player.

"You are in a trial for HTML5 video on YouTube. Some users of supported browsers are automatically entered in to the trial. If you wish to leave the trial, use the link at the bottom. HTML5 is a new browser technology that allows us to show videos without the Flash plugin," explains YouTube.


If you right-click on the video, you'll see a menu that offers two options: "save video as" and "about HTML5". You might assume that "save video as" lets you download the video, but it actually sends you to this video.

Download YouTube Captions

Let's say that you've watched Eric Schmidt's keynote from TechCrunch Disrupt and you want to share some interesting ideas from the video. Fortunately, the video has closed captions and there's also an interactive transcript, but there's no way to copy the text.

The good news is that you can download the captions file if you know the URL: http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=en&v=VIDEO_ID, where you should replace VIDEO_ID with the ID of the YouTube video. Here's the captions file for Eric Schmidt's keynote.

It's an XML file and you can extract plain text by removing all the tags. Right-click on the page, select "view source", copy all the text and paste it on this page.

Now it's easy to copy an excerpt from the keynote:

We have one of the largest databases of information in the world which we've engineered and which is very, very difficult technologically in order to house all that information and ready for more. So, where do we go next with search? Well, you've got personal contacts, personal emails, personal network of people and your relationships with them, and with your permission -- and I need to say that about 500 times -- with your permission, we can actually search and index that information and make all of these answers so much better. The next step after that is obviously autonomous search. This is searches that you're -- that are occurring while you're not even doing searching.

It's Easier to Add YouTube Videos to Playlists

YouTube added more features to the "plus" button displayed when you mouse over a video thumbnail. Until now, the button could only be used to add videos to a queue, so you can play them later. If you click on the small arrow next to the button, you can add the video to your favorites or to one of your playlists. It's much easier to build playlists from search results and from related videos.


Another change is that the "save to" drop-down has been replaced with a button that adds the video you're currently watching to the queue. Click on the arrow next to the button and you can add the video to a playlist.


When you add a video to the queue, YouTube shows a small bar that lets you manage the videos from the queue, save them as a new playlist, disable autoplay or load one of your playlists.