11 youtube hacks You Didn’t Know You Could Do on YouTube
Unlock the power of these 11 YouTube hacks you never knew existed. From optimizing your channel to mastering engagement techniques, these YouTube hacks will revolutionize your content creation journey.
- Find Specific content in a long video
If you want to jump to a specific moment in the video but are unsure where it is, click the three small dots beneath a video and select “Show transcript.” This will show you the full transcript of the video, regardless of whether captions are present or not.
In the browser, hit command F to find where the YouTuber talked about any specific topic. Oh, here it is. At 5:20, here’s the subject that will be happening; click right there, and it goes straight to that point in the video. You can do the same thing on mobile, but instead, you will hit the down arrow next to the video title to get to the description and the bottom. You see the show transcript, and here you can see the transcript going while you play. You can’t search it, but you can undoubtedly scroll through it, find the parts you want, tap right there, and skip to that part of the video.
- Loop your favorite videos
If you’re watching your favorite music video and want to keep looping, right-click anywhere on your desktop. You have this loop option right here, and now it’ll keep playing over and over and repeatedly.
On a mobile, you can do the same thing. You tap on the video up these three little dots in the upper right corner, tap on those, and here’s the loop video off, and now the loop video is on.
- Handoff your video to the desktop
YouTube syncs your viewing across multiple devices, but if you’re watching on your phone and then going to your desktop, you’ll see the bottom right corner where a mini player appears. Now, you can start watching that video on the desktop that you were watching on your phone, so you can pick up right where you left off.
- Quickly scrub, skip, and navigate a video
This was cool. If you just long-press on the video, you can use a back-and-forth motion with your finger to go straight to the point in that video that you want. Still, even more remarkable is while it’s playing; if you double tap with two fingers on the right side, it’ll go to the next chapter, or if you double tap on the left side, it goes back to the beginning of the chapter before. Of course, you can always double tap with one finger and skip forward 10 seconds, or double tap with one finger on the left side, and it goes back by 10 seconds.
- Protect your time on YouTube.
It is so easy to keep scrolling on YouTube and wasting a lot of time; thankfully, in the upper right corner, if you click on your icon, you now have this option for time watching right here in the middle. If you click on it, it will show you how much time you’re spending on YouTube and remind you to take a break, remind you it is bedtime, or autoplay if you want to kill even more time.
- Enable “Stats for Nerds.”
If you want to get nerdy on all the video and coding and streaming what’s going on in the video, anywhere on your desktop, you can right-click and go to stats for nerds in here; you’ll see everything that’s going on about your connection speed, network activity buffer health, codec frames, and everything.
You can do it on mobile as well, but you’ll need to go up to your icon in the upper right corner and then to settings. And then, here, tap on general. And in general, you have lots of incredible options here. If you want to skip forward more than 10 seconds or less than 10 seconds at a time, go down here to stats for nerds, toggle that on, then go back out to the video you want to look at, and then here, under these three little dots up the right corner, tap it. Now it’s down here at the bottom, stats for nerds, and you can now see it on mobile as well.
- Protect your recommendations.
You may want to search for something and spend some time researching how to do something, but you don’t want all that browsing history to mess up your recommendations on your homepage and suggested videos. Instead, you can go to the file and open the incognito window, and here you can browse YouTube to your heart’s content without messing up anything in your recommendations.
Thankfully, this also works on mobile. Tap on your icon located in the upper-right corner. In here, you’ll see, turn on incognito. If you tap it, it’ll now be in incognito mode; you can browse YouTube without impacting your recommendations, search history, or anything. When you’re done, just come back up here to incognito and select, turn it off, and you’ll be right back into your account.
- Explore new recommended Videos
Now, speaking of recommendations, if you’re getting a little bit bored of everything that YouTube is suggesting to you and you want to try something new and fresh, go up and click on those new-to-you chips at the top of YouTube, and it will ultimately give you further recommendations of channels you haven’t watched before, videos that you haven’t seen, and just give you a whole new experience of things that you can dive into.
And yes, it works on mobile too; all these chips at the top, it’ll either be the very last one if you haven’t used it before, or it’ll be right here, the very beginning if you’ve used it recently. tap it here on mobile and get a whole set of new recommendations once again.
- Share a specific point in a video
You’re watching YouTube, you find a great video, and you want to share it, but you want to share it from a specific point to someone. What you can quickly do is go down, click on the share, and then you will get a little check mark, started at 2:50, or anytime you want to type in here and then click this copy link, and when someone then goes and enters in that URL, it’ll start playing that video right at that exact time. Unfortunately, on mobile, that is not the case. If I tap on share, I can only copy the link.
- Download videos for offline viewing
If you pay the monthly fee for YouTube Premium, you will see this download button below the video.
You can click on download, and it’ll download the video to your computer, which is excellent because now you can watch it when you’re offline, if you’re in an airplane or you’re at a subway or place where you don’t have excellent access, and now you can click here to view, or you can go up here and go to downloads and then download all the videos you’ve downloaded. It’ll be right here, and under download settings, you can adjust the quality, whether you want to be high quality or low quality; the higher the quality, the more disc space it takes up. And then, when you’re done with all of them, you can click delete all downloads right here, and that frees up all your space. A mobile device works slightly differently on the homepage while you’re scrolling. You can tap these three little dots right underneath the video and click download.
Or, if you’re watching the video, you’ll see the download icon right here. You could tap it, and it’ll start downloading. To find and access these downloaded videos, you must return to the homepage. You look down here in the bottom right corner; it says library. If you tap on your library, you have this option: downloads.
Now, it gives you a different feature because you have your downloads here at the top that you can watch and play anytime. Still, they also give you recommended downloads, or you can do intelligent downloads, which means that when you’re on MiFi, we’ll download 20 recommended videos and refresh them weekly, so you’ll always have something to watch offline on your phone.
- Download videos for offline viewing
You can find all these keyboard shortcuts quickly by hitting shift and question marks on your keyboard, and you’ll see all of them right here. Still, I’ll show you my favorite ones real quick on desktop and then on mobile. You can click the icon and change the playback speed here if you want, but on your keyboard, it just shifts greater than or less than the speed up or down.
And, of course, to pause, it’s K; to skip forward 10 seconds, it is L; and if we go back 10 seconds at a time, it is J. On mobile, they’ve simplified this a lot. You can access the upper three dots and the listening controls here as a YouTube Premium subscriber. Now you can skip forward from video to video if you’d like, or you can skip forward 10 seconds last, you know, back 10 seconds, or adjust the speed as you want all up from one spot, which is great if you listen to a lot of podcasts on YouTube, especially.
Now, to be clear, you can still use these controls if you’re not a premium member; you have to click these three little dots up here, and instead of going to listening controls, you go to playback speed here, and you can change it there. Then, of course, you can double tap, triple tap, or whatever you want to do to skip forward and backward.
