Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Browser Add-Ons To Enhance Your YouTube Viewing Experience

YouTube is a much-loved source of entertainment; some might think it’s taking over TV due to the sheer amount and types of entertainment: mini web series, tech and tutorial channels, lyric videos and covers etc. It’s no surprise that some of us can spend hours watching YouTube videos on our subscribed list while others can binge-watch recommended videos for the whole day.

Controls

However, there are minor annoyances with the viewing experience that even these YouTube tricks can’t fix. The common complaints (basically First World Problems) are like the layout being distracting, too much white space, and annoying (or awesome) advertisements that eats into your video-viewing time.

To conquer these problems, I am going to introduce to you the Tube Enhancer Plus for Firefox and YouTube Options for Google Chrome.

Awesome "Hidden" YouTube Settings

Both Tube Enhancer Plus and Youtube Options have some pretty cool features, ideal for the serial YouTuber. With them you can:

1. Remove advertisements â€" Both can let you skip the ads at the start of the video.

2. Enlarge player size â€" You can also enlarge the ‘video box’ size so that it fills up the space of your browser window for a closer and clearer view.

3. "Dim the lights" â€" This feature greys out the areas around the video box. This along with #2 maximizes the real estate of your large, high-resolution monitor.

YouTube Resize

4. Set default viewing quality - If changing the video quality often irks you, then worry no more, you now need not manually change it.

5. Set autoplay settings - You can also set the autoplay settings so videos won’t automatically start playing when you open multiple videos in new tabs.

More From Tube Enhancer Plus (Firefox)

Installing Tube Enhancer Plus gives you a few controls at the bottom of your browser window to download or loop the current video on top of the other features mentioned earlier.

Controls

The coolest feature about this add-on is the ability to watch a video on the Firefox Sidebar. This allows (in)effective multitasking as you can surf the Web while watching all your videos.

YouTube Firefox Sidebar

More From YouTube Options (Chrome)

YouTube Options for Chrome has more customizable features. You can hide elements of YouTube like the comments section, video suggestions, video description, title, header and footer from the settings or its keyboard shortcuts. This gives you a super-clean YouTube player.

YouTube Options

Using the mouse scroll wheel while hovering the mouse cursor above the ‘video box’ lets you change the ‘video box’ size, forward/rewind the video, or change the volume level.

Certain features of YouTube Options can also be used on any embedded videos or on sites like Vimeo, Hulu and DailyMotion.

No comments:

Post a Comment