Tip Trick Here: 06/22/13

22 June 2013

YouTube's Smarter Video Player

YouTube had a feature that allowed you to stop buffering a video. You right-clicked a video, selected "stop download" and YouTube no longer downloaded the video. This was especially useful for paused videos and long videos.

The feature is no longer available. I've tried both the Flash player and the HTML5 player.

The truth is that this feature is no longer needed because buffering stops when you pause a video. Try this: open a random YouTube video, wait a few seconds and then pause the video. Even after 5 minutes, YouTube's progress bar will look the same.

YouTube has a smarter way to download videos that uses adaptive streaming and only downloads what's needed. That's only the case for the Flash player: the HTML5 player works just like before.

YouTube Collections

Here's a very cool YouTube feature you should try: collections. It's a simple way to group multiple subscriptions, so you can quickly check the latest videos related to a topic. Let's say you subscribe to the Google channel, the Chrome channel and the Nexus channel. You can create a Google collection that includes all these channels.

"To make a brand new collection or edit an existing one, visit the Subscription Manager, which you can navigate to by clicking Manage subscriptions from the left side of your YouTube page. Click the 'Create new collection button'. Name your collection and select the channels you'd like to include in your collection," explains YouTube. Use the search feature to find the right channels.

Collections are placed at the top of the subscriptions list in the YouTube sidebar, so it's easy to find them. They have a small arrow button that lets you expand the collection and see each subscription. If a subscription is added to collection, you'll no longer see that subscription in the sidebar without expanding collections. It's a great way to organize your subscriptions.

Gmail's Quick Action Button for YouTube Messages

A few weeks ago, Gmail started to show a small button next to some email messages from YouTube. Click the "view video" button and you can watch the video without even reading the message. This is one of the first built-in Gmail actions.

This only works for notifications received when a YouTube channel uploads a new video. If you visit this page when you're signed in, you can check "Email me about new uploads" next to your favorite channels.

{ Thanks, Yu-Hsuan Lin. }

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This story, Connect with Digital Inspiration Around the Web, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 22/06/2013 under Offbeat.

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22 June 2013