Unknown to many, YouTube is not just the world’s most popular video site, it’s also the world’s second most popular search engine as well (parent company Google being the first of course). Millions of people spend countless hours on the site every day to watch useful, funny and sometimes even questionable content, but not many of them know about the five tricks that we are going to discuss next to make your experience on the site more enjoyable.
You Can Make GIFs Directly from YouTube Videos
On social media, GIFs are today what picture comments used to be five years ago and you can make your own animated GIF images directly from a YouTube video. Just type in gifyoutube.com and you will be led to a GIF making site which allows the user to select up to 15-seconds of footage from any YouTube video for making the GIF. You can then save it onto your computer or share directly from there. You may also add your own text and images to it if you want.
You Can Download and Watch Blocked YouTube Videos
Sometimes, certain YouTube videos are location blocked, making them impossible to watch from your current geographical position. The good news is that you can easily download a blocked YouTube video with Freemake from any location and save it on your PC to watch at your own convenience. Furthermore, the videos can be saved in MP4, MKV, AVI, WMV and WebM formats so that the media file can be accessed and viewed from any Android or even Apple device.
You Can Use YouTube for Your Karaoke Sessions
Search for the song that you want with the word “karaoke” at the end of the song’s name and in most cases, you should be able to find a video with karaoke support for that song. If the lyrics are not very accurate, just add a YouTube lyrics extension to your browser for a better experience.
YouTube Keyboard Shortcuts
While it may seem rudimentary, keyboard shortcuts can be extremely helpful while watching any video content and YouTube supports quite a few of them as well. Check out some of the more useful ones below.
- Left Arrow Key – Back by 5 seconds
- Right Arrow Key – Forward by 5 seconds
- Up Arrow Key – Increase volume
- Down Arrow Key – Decrease volume
- J – back by 10 seconds
- L -Forward by 10 seconds
- F – Full screen
- M – Mute
- Space/K – Pause or Play video
- / – Go to the Search Box
- C – Activate/Deactivate captions and subtitles
- Shift + P – Previous video
- Shift + N – Next video
You Can Identify the Background Details
We have all stumbled upon videos where we really like the background music, but do not have any way to determine the details about that track/music or the singer/band. However, an external source, MooMa is quite reliable for finding out such details by simply copy-pasting the YouTube video link onto their search bar.
While playing YouTube videos in the background is something we would all like to do on our Android and iOS apps, it’s not possible at the moment unless you have a paid YouTube Red subscription or you have rooted your smartphone. Nevertheless, to make use of the features mentioned here, you don’t really have to do anything too fancy!
