Whatever the reason, it is always good to have options at hand. The Google Chrome extension Video Viewer provides one. It basically allows the user to watch videos right on the current page.

How does it work? Video Viewer will recognize video links on web pages, and add a context menu entry to the right click menu automatically. The Watch Video item opens the selected video in a popup on the same browser page, which means that no additional tabs will be opened in the process.

Just right-click, select watch video and enjoy the video on the page. The rest of the screen will be darkened automatically by the extension.

The video overlay offers most video controls. For Youtube videos, it is possible to pause them, change the video volume, navigate in the video, switch to fullscreen playback and display embed codes.

There is however no option to change the quality settings of the video, or make additional changes that are displayed on the video portal pages.

Watch Video is not only compatible with Youtube, but also with Dailymotion, Vimeo and Metacafe.

Watch Video can be an interesting extension for users who often watch linked videos on the web. The developer should add a visual indicator to supported video links to make it easier for the user to distinguish between (supported) video links and regular links.

Users start by clicking on File > Search in the menu to open the search interface which can be used to list all available channels or filtered channel lists either by keyword or pre-selection (e.g. sports, top 100). It is also possible to enter a keyword which will search for and return all channels matching that keyword. A good start is probably the top 100 channel list.

It takes a few seconds to populate the channel list which displays one channel per row. Each row includes the name, bitrate, quality, audience and other values. The most important are the bitrate, quality and audience as these are indicators on the quality of the picture and the bandwidth that is needed to watch the channel fluently.

A click on a channel with open an internal viewer that is connecting to the selected tv channel. This process can also take some time as the StreamTorrent begins the buffering process.

The player offers basic status information and controls including a buffer bar, changing to full screen and changing the volume.

Watching tv is probably the most popular use of StreamTorrent. It is possible to add new channels to the application and to start a live stream from the local computer system.

Update:

Streamtorrent is no longer available on Google Code. The project has been pulled citing terms of service violations. We have uploaded the latest working version of the program to our servers. You can download StreamTorrent from the following link: StreamTorrent (518)