5 YouTube Tricks You Probably Didn't Know

Chances are most of us are quite familiar with YouTube. YouTube is the largest video channel on the Internet with more than 1 billion users visiting each month after all. We can enjoy a variety of videos on YouTube like comedy, pranks, interviews, tutorials, and live events.

I bet you have been enjoying countless of hours in YouTube. So, here we’ve put together 5 handy tricks to make YouTube more enjoyable for you.

1. Disabling Video Annotation

Annotation is a clickable box that overlays on top of YouTube videos. It aims to improve user engagement by displaying extra information or links related to the videos. It is useful for the video uploader, but can also be quite annoying for the users. Do you want to hide these annotations?

You can disable annotations to all YouTube videos via the YouTube settings. Click your profile picture then click the gear icon (YouTube Setting). On the left sidebar, select Playback and uncheck the Annotations and Interactivityoption. Easy as that.

Unchecking this option will also hide the channel promotion and interactive card on the video you are watching.

2. Force Buffering Of The Entire Video

YouTube actually buffers only 30 seconds of the total video length when the video is paused. When your Internet connection isn’t quite fast enough to load the video this causes a lag. To avoid this, you can force YouTube to buffer the entire video before you can play it through,

SmartVideo for YouTube is a tool that can help with this and is available as a Firefox Add-on and Chrome Extension. After you’ve installed it and opened a YouTube video, you will see an additional option at the bottom of the video, click Global Preferences, and tick the box for Smart Buffer, as shown in the image below.

3. Disable Autoplay

YouTube will immediately start playing a video you’ve just opened which can sometimes be annoying. To disable autoplay video on YouTube, you can use the YouTube Control Center Add-on in Firefox or Stop Autoplay extension for Chrome.

It has a handful of options to control a YouTube video. Install this Add-on, and find Autoplays video when the player loads. Keep this option unchecked to disable Autoplay. Another option is the Stop Autoplay extension which does the same thing. You need to install it on Chrome, then activate it via the chrome://extensions/ page.

4. Watching YouTube In Slow-motion

Sometimes you’re watching a video in YouTube and it’s moving so fast that you can’t see the tiny details that you could’ve missed. Perhaps you want to play the video at a slower pace.

YouTube actually has HTML5 Player for its videos that you can request in YouTube.com/html5. Click Request the HTML 5 Player. Now open a video, you will find the option with speed adjustment. Do keep in mind though that you’ll need a browser that fully supports HTML5 video.

5. Download A YouTube Video’s Subtitle

There are many videos on YouTube that come in a language that you’re probably not familiar with. YouTube actually lets the video author add subtitles to help their viewers understand what is being said. However, if you’re downloading a particular video, the subtitles won’t come with it.

Use KeepSub to download the subtitles embedded in the video. Just copy the video url on the form, press the button and KeepSub will retrieve the subtitles for downloading. In addition, KeepSub also offers the translated subtitles using Google Translate.