You see, YouTube made the decision to move the easily accessible inbox from the front page behind the account name in the top right corner of the screen. To reach the YouTube inbox, you need to first click on the name and then on Inbox to be taken there. Once there you still may need to select a different entry, e.g. comments instead of personal messages which means yet another click before you land there.

The free userscript YouTube startpage inbox changes this by adding the inbox and all of its links back to YouTube’s homepage.

Once installed, you will see direct links to all inbox entries on the homepage again. The script adds them to the right sisdebar just above the recommended video section there. The links point to personal messages, shared with you, comments, contact suggestions and video responses. Each entry lists the number of unread messages which makes the feature that more convenient as you can now see directly if you have new messages or notifications waiting for you in your inbox.

The inbox at the top lists the total of unread messages and notifications.

Please note that the inbox is only displayed on the frontpage and not on other pages of YouTube.

The script has been tested in the Firefox web browser with the Scriptish extension. It likely works in other browsers such as Google Chrome as well.

Most YouTube users do not know that there is an option to reset the page to the old layout. This can be achieved by writing a cookie to the local system that tells the video hosting site that the old layout needs to be loaded and not the new page design.

Please note that this may cease to work at any time as YouTube may simply remove the old page design from their servers. Setting the cookie would have no effect then. For now though, it works splendid.

You can revert the YouTube homepage to its former self with the help of a userscript or by writing the cookie directly on the system. The userscript appears to be working in Firefox, with Greasemonkey or Scriptish installed, Google Chrome and Opera. The developer notes that Opera users need to import the script manually in the browser though. Instructions on how to do that are offered on the userscript page.

Take a look at the following two screenshots to see the difference. First the new YouTube page (no idea why the big header is showing up blank)

and then the old YouTube page.

All you need to do is to install the userscript to set the cookie. Please note that the homepage layout will stick even if you uninstall the userscript again. You need to clear the cookie that it writes on your system to get the new YouTube homepage layout again.

As I mentioned before, you can also set the cookie manually.

Open the YouTube website.
In Chrome, press Ctrl-Shift-j to open the Developer Tools
In Firefox, press Ctrl-Shift-k to open the web console
Enter document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=tYJElFX0sZI”; in the console tab and press Enter.
Reload the YouTube page.

If you are visiting YouTube regularly, which design do you prefer? (Thanks Odio for the tip)

There is however a much easier solution that that all YouTube users can make use of to skip ahead a certain percentage of the video. All that needs to be done is to press a number between 1 and 9 on the YouTube video page after you have clicked on the video. Nothing happens if you try to press the numbers once the video starts playing on the side. You need to click on the video, which pauses it, to use the functionality.

The numbers 1 to 9 correspond to 10 to 90 per cent of the play time of the video. If you press 3 you skip ahead 30% as suggested by the Wadsworth Constant, but you can select to skip more or less of the video by tapping on a different number on your keyboard.

This works well in combination with scripts that auto pause a video automatically, for instance to let it buffer for a while or save bandwidth by avoiding auto play. We have reviewed several scripts that can do that here on Ghacks. Check out the userscript Automatically Buffer Youtube Videos and Youtube Videos: Playback Problems And Fixes for general tips.

The constant works sometimes but not all of the time. It works great for trailers and videos produced by tv or film studios. You will obviously encounter videos where it does not work at all. Have you tried to skip ahead in videos to save time by skipping ahead to the important content?

Please note that this is being tested right now by Google. This new test homepage may or may not become the new YouTube homepage in the future. For now, YouTube visitors can enable it in the following way:

• Open the YouTube website.
• In Chrome, press Ctrl-Shift-j to open the Developer Tools
• In Firefox, press Ctrl-Shift-k to open the web console
• Enter document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU"; in the console tab and press Enter.
• Reload the YouTube page.

It is likely that this is working in other web browsers as well. I could not get it to work in the latest Opera web browser though.

The YouTube homepage looks like this after a reload.

YouTube users find their channel information prominently displayed on the left side. Listed here are links to the channel videos, likes, history and watch later groups, subscription information, YouTube specific information like trending or what’s popular as well as suggested channels to subscribe to.

The middle column is filled with updates from a user’s subscriptions. The right column finally displays recommended videos based on past videos that have been watched and activities on YouTube.

The new design seems to only affect the homepage and no other parts of the site. Several users seem to confuse the new YouTube homepage design with the previously released Cosmic Panda update. They are not the same and can in fact be run at the same time. I would suggest to first enable the new homepage design and then enable Cosmic Panda via the link above.

What I do not like about the new homepage is that it uses a fixed width for the content. If you have a widescreen monitor you end up with lots of whitespace there.

Have you tried the new homepage? If so, what is your opinion? I’m not sure where this all started, but one of the first, if not the first, to point it out was Moritz Tolxdorff on Google+.

And while we are at it. If you want to try out the new YouTube video uploader, you need to open the following web address: http://upload.youtube.com/my_videos_upload?forceui=4.

Update: You can remove the new YouTube homepage again by repeating the steps and changing the cookie command to this one: document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=0";

YouTube has added commands to the video hosting platform to correct the aspect ratio of already uploaded videos. While the end result won’t be as pretty as re-processing the video, it will save the director the troubles of doing that.

Take a look at the following two screenshots. The first shows a video that I have recently uploaded to YouTube. It has black bars on the right and left. The second screenshot shows the same video after making the changes on YouTube. It is now stretched. The bars are gone.

YouTube some time ago has added commands that are executed when added to a video’s tags. Commands are available to get rid of black bars on videos. Here are all commands that you can utilize.

• yt:crop=16:9 – This tag crops the video. It basically means that the player zooms in on the video so that contents at the borders may be not visible anymore.
• yt:stretch=16:9 – Stretches the video into a 16:9 format. This is the tag I have used for the video. Depending on the size of the black bars, it may make the video look distorted.
• yt:stretch=4:3 – Another stretch command. This stretches the video into a 4:3 format instead.
• yt:quality=high – Sets the video to play in high quality, if a hq version of the video has been uploaded by the owner.

You can apply tags by clicking on the Edit button next to the video in your YouTube videos listing.

Just copy and paste the commands into the tags text box and click Save Changes afterwards. Re-open the video on YouTube and watch how the tag modified the aspect ratio. You may need to reload it once or twice for that. If you are not happy with the result go back and use another tag or remove the existing one.

The options to crop or stretch videos will usually not result in optimal videos. Videos may look to stretched or important parts of the video may be missing if you have selected to crop it. In that case, you may have no other choice but to process it again on your local computer.

The main advantage of those video tags is the fact that you do not have to process and upload the video again to YouTube.

Here is a video that demonstrates use of the video tags.

As a content creator. How do you handle black bars in videos? As a user on YouTube: Do you prefer black bars over stretched videos?

So what functionality do those bars add to the YouTube experience? The gray bar may appear if you click on a liked or subscribed video, showing other videos that you liked or from a channel that you are subscribed to.

The main annoyance here is that the bar cannot be disabled completely. The gray bar is linked to YouTube accounts, which means that users who are not logged in will not see the your subscriptions bar, my liked videos bar, my favorited videos bar or any other bar that YouTube may display at the bottom of the screen. Not logging in is therefor the most effective option to avoid the gray bar on YouTube.

The bars display direct links to other videos, navigational controls like loading the next or previous video of the playlist and auto-shuffle and auto-repeat options. You can futhermore hide the playlist which does not really hide it but changes the interface to a single line without video thumbnails.

Subscription Bar Remover For Youtube is a Chrome extension that is capable of hidding all gray bars on YouTube complete. It can hide the liked videos bar and the your subscriptions bar for instance which are the two most common gray bars shown on YouTube.

Just install the Chrome extension to get rid of those bars immediately.

Firefox users can install the userscript Removes Youtube’s Subscription Bar/Autoplay that offers the same functionality. Please note that you need to install an extension like Greasemonkey or Scriptish before you can install userscripts in the Firefox web browser. The userscript is working under Opera as well.

Have you seen the gray bar on YouTube before?

XL version, what’s that again? If you point your web browser to youtube.com/xl you will see a different layout, optimized for large screens. The differences? Night and day.

Youtube XL displays very large buttons in a sidebar, larger video thumbnails, titles and information in the main area and a big search form on top.

Youtube XL lists spotlight videos by default. Each video box is completely clickable making it easier to load a video. Videos that are loaded make use of a similar optimized interface.

Next to the video that starts playing automatically are several related video entries and five buttons at the bottom to favorite, flag or share the video, display video information and see related videos which is also the default page.

Most controls on Youtube XL change elements on the page without reloading the whole page. This speeds up surfing noticeably. The sidebar on the homepage offers access to several video filters. It is for instance possible to switch from spotlight to top rated or most viewed, and change the time based filter from today to all time or this week.

The more link offers groups of additional buttons that were not included in the main layout. Here it is possible to access several music categories for instance.

Youtube XL supports accounts, and users can login normally. This is a requirement for some features like favoring a video. The settings can be used to change the display language and geography. Another useful option here is the setting to play the next video automatically when the current video ends, which reduces the user interaction further. Oh, and before you ask: Yes, there is a fullscreen option.

Youtube XL can be an interesting option for users who access the video hosting site on large screens.

The Greasemonkey script Youtube Auto Buffer And Auto HD and Remove Ads offers a quick and unobtrusive solution to that problem and two additional ones.

Youtube videos will automatically buffer completely without playback. Users who want to do that manually need to press the pause button on each video so that the video is not played but the contents are buffered. The script automates that process.

The Greasemonkey script adds two additional features. The first will automatically load the HD version of the opened Youtube videos. That’s a feature that most Youtube scripts and add-ons provides. The second will remove those annoying ads that are displayed at the bottom of Youtube videos.

Some users reported that they got the script working not only in the Firefox web browser but also in Opera. Interested users can download it from the Userscripts website. Make sure to check out our download Youtube videos guide if you are interested in download videos from the video portal.

Youtube Annotations could be used to add information to the video. This is a great chance to add value to a video but poses the risk that many videos might be misused for advertisement.

Thankfully though it’s relatively easy to turn annotations off unfortunately though only on a per video basis. The Youtube video bar at the bottom of each video has a new item located in the right corner of the bar.

If you click on that icon a new icon appears on top of it. That icon turns the annotations off and on. Probably only a matter of time until someone creates a Greasemonkey script for users who want to turn off annotations completely.

Although the website is completely in German it should not be a problem for non-German speakers to navigate the website. The process is easy and clear. A search term is entered in the only search box on the main page of MP3 Getter. Youtube is then queried and the results are shown on the next page. Ten results are shown with preview images and names and a click on any of them loads the video in the foreground.

The video starts playing automatically and a click on the button MP3 downloaden starts the process to split the audio from the video. It takes a while and a save file dialog box is presented once the mp3 file has been created.

MP3 Getter has the advantage over similar web services in two key areas. It provides a Youtube search which means that the user does not have to copy and paste the url of the video that he wants the audio from. The second is that the video is actually playing while the ripping is processed.

You will be delighted that there is a speedy url hack (thanks to the Google OS blog) that bypasses both restrictions. This means that country restrictions as well as age restrictions will be bypassed. The following video for example points to one that is only available to US-residents: Youtube Video. If you click on the link and do not have a US IP address then you will receive the message that the video is not available in your country. US-Residents who can watch most videos on Youtube will run into difficulties when they try to watch some BBC content for instance.

All that needs to be done to watch the video is to change the URL of the video slightly. The above example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU would be changed to http://www.youtube.com/v/I9ciR9qR1dU to watch the video. This can be done with every video available at Youtube. So basically the watch? part is removed and the = after the v is replaced by a /.

You can also bet that it takes some time to convert the 140+ million videos hosted on the website. The default video resolution is 320×200 and the two new resolutions that are tested are 448×336 and 480×360. To test it you only need to append the parameters &fmt6 for 448×336 or &fmt18 for 480×360 video resolutions.

Not all videos are converted as of yet and videos that have not are displaying the loading screen all the time.

320×200 quality: [link]

480×360 quality: [link]

Firefox users can access a Greasemonkey script that changes the video resolution. [via Googlesystem]

Each request for a youtube video is routed through the Speedbit servers which open five new connections to the video server offering the video which results in a speed increase which can be remarkable.

The service has to be running in the system tray while watching youtube videos and starts automatically whenever a new video is requested from youtube. I was not able to take a look at some of the program features that are shown at the developers website but the video acceleration is working fine.

As you can see the technology is working in Firefox and Internet Explorer, unfortunately not in Opera. I found the software at the Connected Internet Blog.