In a sense, YouTube is the reason for the death of what used to be MTV – it changed the way we listened to music. YouTube also changed the way we watched the news. Since I can stream news channels live, I'm considering not renewing our Tata Sky subscription! YouTube helped us find our daily cup of joy in the form of cute dog and cat videos among other things. In short, the platform is where most of us spend a lot of time and some of these useful YouTube tips will help:
When you click on the Settings button (I've marked it in a blue circle for you) you see all these options. The annotations feature is something content creators use to give more info or encourage us to view more. Text and images will appear on the screen at specific times in the video that can be switched on or off.
The playback speed can be changed – slowed down to .25 and sped up to 2x the actual speed. Slowing down is good when trying to figure out precise words or when taking notes. If I'm listening to a podcast or informative video I generally speed it up to 1.5x.
If you click the CC button, the subtitles or translations for the video will be generated in the video. While the automatically generated ones are not wholly accurate they are useful for when listening to something in a different accent, or when one wants to know about lyrics and so on. Inside the settings menu, you can choose the type of subtitles you want.
You can also decide on the kind of video quality you want. For instance, if your internet connection is poor, you may lower the quality so the video doesn’t pause or buffer. At other times you improve the quality such as when you want to watch a movie and the image quality becomes important.
On your YouTube mobile app, click on your image or avatar on the top right. It will give you your daily average and the time you’ve spent watching videos over the past week. This is based on one’s watch history across YouTube products. You can tell YouTube to ‘remind me to take a break’, ‘remind me when it is bedtime’ and you can also enable or turn off autoplay from here. I couldn’t figure out how to do this on my desktop when I'm using YouTube in my browser however, so this appears to be an app-only feature.
The app also lets users go incognito – there are many reasons for this, not just because people want to watch things that they feel others may judge them on. Sometimes we want to watch something that is unusual for us and we don’t want it to mess with our algorithm. We may want to research something, someone else may ask to use the app or kids may want to watch videos for a while. Going incognito means that you don’t keep seeing suggestions of nursery rhyme videos right after a toddler has been viewing them.
This to me was a truly amazing feature that I discovered very recently. You can check out the transcript of any YouTube video by clicking on the three dots below the video (indicated within the blue circle). You can either report the video if you want from here or you can click to open the transcript in a box. Each line with the time it appears in the video will become listed. If you're looking for a particular phrase or want to quickly scan the contents of a video, this feature is really useful.
We share videos but sometimes we want to share them from a particular time. So when you click the share button below the video, this will pop up and automatically show the time you're at in the video. You can change it as you need to and the link generated will start the video from the specified time. The platform and app people have really packed a lot of great tips and features into YouTube – why not make good use of them to use the video platform more effectively.
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