YouTube has a surprising number of built-in shortcuts that many people don’t know about. If you want to know what tips exist for YouTube, read this guide. You can view this guide as a comprehensive list of tips, tricks and shortcuts for everyone’s favorite video content platform.
Some of these shortcuts and tips are available directly from YouTube, while others are available through your browser or other means through your computer. Ok, let’s get started.
YouTube video play shortcuts I
Perhaps the most useful shortcuts are centered on the video playback controls. Many people know that pressing the space bar pauses or starts video playback. You can also press K. But there are many more shortcuts for playing videos. Here’s a full overview of what’s available.
For example, pressing the left arrow will jump back 5 seconds. Alternatively, the right arrow will move forward 5 seconds. Want to go further? Use J and L to jump 10 seconds backward or forward 10 seconds, respectively.
Additional navigation options are also available for quick skipping. 0 or Home will take you to the beginning. The end will take you to the end of the video. Numbers 1-9 will guide you through the video at regular intervals. For example, 5 will jump from 2 minutes to 4 minutes of video.
If you’d rather speed up the process rather than skip it, you can do that too. Just use Shift +> or Shift + Finally, you can move through frames using “.” Or “,” when the video is paused. This can be useful for capturing screenshots at certain moments or for capturing small details that you might otherwise miss in a video. Want to increase or decrease the volume on the go? The up and down arrows will gradually increase or decrease the volume of the YouTube player by 5%. You can also mute or unmute the video with m. Want to rescale your video? You can do that too. Pressing f will take you to full screen mode, and pressing ESC will exit full screen mode. Or press i to create a small picture-in-picture video that allows you to continue watching while watching. Pressing i will take you back to the video page. Finally, press t to enter theater mode. Here’s more. Turn subtitles on / off with c, toggle subtitle background color options with b, and move to new videos in the playlist with SHIFT + p for previous or SHIFT + n for next. Helpful YouTube search commands
Let’s take a look at some other useful YouTube commands, tips, and tricks that you can use to quickly navigate your website. In particular, YouTube search teams.
If you’re already on YouTube, you can press / to quickly jump to the search bar. Not on YouTube? Just enter youtube.com in the URL and press TAB. Then enter what you want to search for and you will be taken directly to the YouTube search results.
Or how about searching right from your desktop? Press Windows Key + R to open the Run window, then type chrome youtube.com/results?search_query=SEARCH ‘. Remove parentheses and replace “SEARCH” with your search term. Chrome will immediately open a new tab with the search terms you selected.
If you are not using Chrome, you can replace the chrome in the above command with “firefox”, “iexplore” or “microsoft-edge”.
There are also some search tips that you can use to further define what you are looking for. Below are some examples.
You can remove terms or filter words using “+” or “-“. For example, you want to know about the city of Bangalore in India. Searching for Bangalore on YouTube will reveal all sorts of content unrelated to the city of the same name. In this example, specifically from a game called Apex Legends.
You can remove the term Apex Legends by searching Bangalore -apex -legends.
The above is an example of two search results and their differences. You can use this in a number of ways to remove videos that you don’t want to see in search results. This is also where many of the search operators that work for Google.com will work.
You can force certain terms into your search by using the “” signs above any term. As an example, let’s say you want to search a country travel vlog for a specific month to see what the weather might be like.
A search on the Brazil Travel Blog “April” will return results that have April in the title. As you can see in the image above, this can be an effective way to find specific terms.
More YouTube tips hidden inside the menus
You can also find a number of helpful YouTube tips in various menus and user interface panels. Here are some of my favorites.
First, if you accidentally close the window or want to re-watch a video that you remembered in the past, you can click the story in the tab on the right side of the home page. You can scroll through your story and even search for it, making it easier to find a specific video. It also allows you to quickly find videos when switching between devices.
Be sure to click Enable Browsing History on this page to keep your history recorded. This tip won’t help you find videos you’ve watched when your browsing history is turned off.
If you watch or love a lot of videos and want to save the video for later use, you can leave a comment and then use the comment history tool on this page to find it later. You can even find detailed information on your past searches here.
Want to reduce eye strain? YouTube has a dark mode. To enable it, click your profile picture in the upper right corner. Then click on Dark Theme: Off from the drop-down menu that appears. Click to turn on dark mode.
Summary
Thank you for taking the time to read our YouTube tips and tricks. We covered the following in this tutorial:
- Unique search functions
- Playback shortcuts
- Basic functionality hidden within menus.
Which of these features did you like the most? Let me know. If you have any tips of your own, feel free to share them on Twitter. I would love to hear what you have to offer. Enjoy!
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