YouTube has a lot of built-in features that let you customize how you watch videos and clips, including Full Screen mode, quality settings and Watch Later. However, there are many brilliant Chrome extensions that take things a step further and let you watch videos exactly how and when you want to.
In this post we’ve handpicked our favorites. YouTube Feed, ensures you never miss videos from your favorite feeds, while YouTube Thumbs previews videos before you click to watch the. You can see which videos are popular with YouTube Rating Preview, toggle comments on or off, or repeat clicks and whole videos using Auto Replay. To control the volume and playback of multiple videos, we recommend YouTube Volume Controller. And if you want to control the size of the player and get rid of other distractions, we show you how with the Picture-in-Picture extension, YouTube Window Expander and Turn Off the Lights.
Each add-ons is available from the Chrome Web Store and you can enable, disable or remove them by going to Tools, then Extensions.
1. When you hover your mouse over a thumbnail, the YouTube Thumbs extension shows stills from different parts of the video on a loop, so you can see what the video is about before watching it. It works on thumbnails in feeds, in search results and in related videos.
2. Click the YouTube Feed icon and log into your YouTube account. When a new video is added to a feed you subscribe to, a green notification appears. Click the icon to see which feeds have added new videos. Click a video to start watching it.
3. With YouTube Ratings Preview, each thumbnail has a green and red bar under it to show you the number of likes and dislikes the video has received. Hover over the bar to see the percentage and find out how many people have rated it.
4. Once you’ve chosen a video, you can get rid of the comments underneath using the Toggle Comments extension. Click the spanner and got to Tools, Extensions. Find the Toggle Comments and click Enable. To turn the comments back on, untick the Enabled box.
5. To control the playback and volume of multiple videos you have open in different tabs, click the YouTube Volume Controller icon. All Mute silences every videos, or you can tick the Mute box for individual videos. You can pause he videos as a group or individual videos. You can pause the videos as a group or individually.
6. The top slider controls the volume of all the videos, while the sliders underneath control individual videos. You can ‘Jump to’ places in each video, skip back and forward by five seconds, or restart the clip.
7. Using the Picture-in-Picture add-on, click the PiP button and video will start playing in a small pop-up window in the corner of your screen, it will stay visible until you click the cross. Click the spanner to change its position, and click Settings to change playback options.
8. To watch videos in a large screen while keeping your Taskbar and tabs visible, click the YouTube Window Expander icon. Unlike Full Screen, YouTube Widow Expander filles the browser window, not the whole screen. Click the icon again to revert to the normal setting.
9. Turn Off the Lights makes everything in the browser window, expect your video, fade out, click the light bulb icon to dim the surrounding screen, or to bring it back to normal. Right-click this icon and choose Options to change the background and opacity.
10 If you want to watch a video on a loop, tick the Auto Play button. This will play the video in full, repeatedly. To relay a specific section, Click the double arrow, and key in the clip times in the Replay From and Replay To boxes.