Best YouTube Hacks

YouTube is one of those tools that no one really knows how to work. Many Google owned services are this way, as they will contain a large list of features that the average user never finds out about. Most of the people who frequent YouTube every single day don't know about half of the cool things they can do with the site. How could they, as no one has ever told them?

These are only a few YouTube hacks, but they are arguably the best ones.

Feather

What is the worse part about YouTube? The comments, hands down. Of course, they are starting to filter things differently in order to eliminate spam, trolling and general stupidty. But if you would rather lose them full stop, you can try Feather. The Feather service is currently in beta, and you can opt in. It will give you nothing but the bare bones of any video, without the frills like comments filling the page. This makes them faster to load and much less infuriating. No more do you have to read 12-year-olds calling each other names, or put up with political debates in completely unrelated video comment sections.

Resize Embedded Videos

When you take the embed code from a video, it might look something like this: <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_hhhhh" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>. Located in the coding are the width and height specifications. You can change that size to fit anything you like, and it will adapt accordingly.

Skip a Percentage

Most videos these days have some kind of introduction. Usually, it will take up the first 10% - 30% of the video, and it is a pain to sit through. Skipping through it is also annoying when you have to drag the cursor to get to a certain spot. If you know the intro and how long it is, such as with a series you frequently watch, you can skip it by those percentages. So when you hit the play button, just type in a number, such as 1 for 10%, 2 for 20%, 3 for 30%, ect.

Use Shortcut Keys

As mentioned before, you can use shortcut keys to jump to different percentages of the video. But you can also use letter keys to control the clip. Using 'J' will rewind the video and allow you to see it moving forward so you can know just where to stop. The 'L' key works to fast forward the video. 'K' works to play and pause the clip.

=> More about Youtube shortcuts here

Extract Audio Tracks

Sometimes you just want the audio track that is set with a video. There are many tools out there that let you extract it and convert it to an MP3 or other audio format. ListenToYouTube is one. Just put in the URL to the video and it will do the rest. Another is VidtoMp3, which works in the same way. Once you have downloaded your audio track, you can add it to any device that takes MP3 files, or attach it to another video.

Create Video Streams

Did you know you can paste video clips together to create a stream of clips? Quite a few incredibly popular viral videos have been made the same way, and you don't have to use an expensive editor to do it. YouTube has their own free editor to use. You can combine, trim, rotate and add text or annotations to clips.

Do you have a YouTube hack you would like to share? Let us know in the comments!

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