The new browse page on YouTube divides contents into categories on the left side. You can now browse categories like gaming, science and technology, or sports more easily. Each page displays the most viewed videos at the top followed by popular videos and select channels

Here is is then possible to click on a specific video to watch that video on YouTube, or on a channel name to open that channel on the website. YouTube users and companies listed on the pages should benefit highly from the new exposure.

YouTube has improved the capabilities and look and feel of the site’s video editor. The video editor has received a visual overhaul, a “cool new timeline, easier clip trimming and a moving playhead”.

One interesting feature that is now available is the ability to join multiple uploaded videos into one. This is done by dragging and dropping the videos on the timeline. The video editor is a useful tool for basic or last minute video editing. On the downside, it does not come close to the functionality that desktop applications like VirtualDub provide.

Last December’s update of the Video Manager did not play well with many YouTube content producers. The new video manager resolves some of the issues that users had with the update. Likes and dislike statistics have for instance been re-added to the manager interface. Sorting videos by popularity has also returned.

The video manager furthermore has received a visual update, an improved “display of scheduled uploads and claimed videos”, and a search history.

You can read the announcement over at the official YouTube blog.

While it is understandable that Google wants to earn money from the service, it is also understandable that some users may be fed up with the video ads that they are forced to watch. This is especially true if the same video ad is showing up on multiple videos that you watch on YouTube.

Some videos can be skipped after five seconds of play, while others cannot be skipped at all.

Most users do not mind the occasional ad as they very well know that it costs a lot to operate a site like YouTube. If you have to endure video ads on YouTube constantly though, you may be inclined to look for a way to bypass those ads to improve your experience on the site.

The Google Chrome extension Skip Ads On YouTube does exactly that. It is a manual solution though and not automatic. The extension adds a blue play button to the YouTube video page. A click on the button skips any video ad that is playing at that moment and goes right to the hosted video.

The downside to this operation is that you have to click on the button every time you want to skip a video ad on the site. It also needs to be noted that it only works on YouTube directly, and not on third party sites.

The developer has made available a paid version of the extension that can skip ads on YouTube automatically. It is available for $4.

Google Chrome users can download and install Skip ads on YouTube from the official Chrome web store.

Several alternatives are available:

• YouTube Options for Google Chrome – Options to hide in-video-ads and annotations.
• Skip Youtube Video Ads With F5
• Block YouTube video ads with TubeStop for Firefox

Know of another option to block video ads or those small overlay text ads on YouTube? Let everyone know about it in the comments.

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?

YouTube is taking that concept a step further with YouTube Slam, a new feature where videos are battling it out against each other.

The idea is simple: Promote talented video makers on YouTube with the help of Slam. Three different games are currently offered, comedy, cute and bizarre slam.

Two videos are displayed on the same page to the user. YouTube users now watch both videos and vote for one that they like more. The video they like gets a vote which moves it up on the overall leaderboard.

A question like “which one’s funnier” is displayed on the battle page. Videos are not obviously played at the same time, even though that’s possible by clicking play on both at the same time.

Users can also click on the skip button to skip the decision and load two new videos that they can watch and vote for.

Videos are exchanged on a weekly basis with about a thousand videos to watch in each category each week. That’s 3000 videos per week and 12000 per month.

YouTube users who do not want to vote can visit the leaderboard pages right away to watch the top videos of the current week and past weeks. A play all button is available too.

YouTube Slam serves a number of purposes. It provides users with an never ending wave of upcoming videos to watch, and video makers with an opportunity to gain extra exposure if their videos are selected by YouTube to participate in a weekly battle.

The most popular category by far currently is Comedy Slam with about four times the number of total votes.

YouTube Slam could become highly popular with the “funny” or “cute” video crowd. What’s your take on the new service?

VideoDropper is a free add-on for Dropbox that can be used to save YouTube videos into Dropbox. This can be useful under certain circumstances, for instance if you cannot view YouTube videos at your current location or are not allowed to do so. Many users email YouTube video urls that they cannot view right away to one of their email accounts to view them later on another computer.

VideoDropper offers an alternative to that. The program offers two core benefits: It is easy to use, and since videos are stored in the Dropbox account, they will also be synchronized automatically with all connected devices once they come online the next time.

YouTube users who often get the dreaded “video not available in your country” message benefit from the service as well, as it can be used to bypass those restrictions.

First thing that you need to do is to connect VideoDropper with your Dropbox account. Just visit the web page and click on the Login with your Dropbox link to connect the services. You can also sign up for a new Dropbox account if you do not have one or want to use a secondary account for the videos.

You can then start to paste YouTube urls into the form so that they are automatically downloaded to the connected Dropbox account. Videos can be downloaded in their original format, or optimized for iPhone or iPod Touch devices.

All videos are added to a queue before they are downloaded. It can take a few minutes before they start to appear in the Dropbox.

Users who do not want to paste YouTube video urls can alternatively use a bookmarklet in the browser to make the process convenient. All videos are saved into the root Dropbox folder. This could become a issue for users who download dozens of videos from YouTube regularly.

VideoDropper offers an interesting service for Dropbox users who want to download YouTube videos or use Dropbox as a way to store videos that they cannot watch right away.

One of the biggest issues any teacher will tell out about though is finding good resources.  It’s bad enough that schemes of work, lesson plans, individual learning plans and assessment and evaluation sessions take up all of your time.  To find the time to locate quality teaching resources on top of all this is extremely difficult indeed.  This is why most teachers are resource hogs who will always try to get copies of resource libraries from other teachers whenever there’s a meeting or a training event.

Now though, Google has stepped into the fold with that can only be described as a godsend.  They’ve launched a special YouTube Schools website where they’ve aggregated thousands of hours of video content and filtered out all the “distracting” stuff.

The content is filtered into 400 playlists, with more to follow, on subjects including mathematics, English, social studies and more.  All of this is then filtered again into age groups.

In a press release, Brian Truong, YouTube’s project manager said…

We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classrooms, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or cute cat, or a video that wasn’t appropriate for students.

While schools that restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that could help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.

To make matters even better for educational establishments of all varieties the YouTube for Schools programme can divert all YouTube traffic from their establishment direct to the new site.  This means that students can only use YouTube to watch educational videos, rather than being distracted by the latest Beyonce video.  This site says it…

…gives you access to the hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube EDU. This includes short lessons from top teachers around the world, full courses from the world’s best universities, professional development from fellow educators and inspiring videos from thought leaders.

The new system allows schools and educational establishments that sign up to customise the content to suit their own needs with teachers and systems administrators able to create custom playlists for students to match and suit individual differences in curriculum.

If you’re not a teacher you probably won’t get just how much of a big deal this launch is, trust me when I say that it’s positively huge and will save teachers worldwide hundreds of hours of fruitless searching for content and having to watch dozens of long videos before finding something suitable for a lesson in class.  Finally the peace of mind that comes with students not being able to look at “Cat playing with iPad” again is worth its weight in platinum.

The saving of YouTube video views may be a privacy issue to some users. While you could say that logging out of your account after using the computer resolves the issue, it is not that easy. Why? Because YouTube keeps track of viewed videos even if you are not logged into a Google account or a YouTube account.

Just visit the site, make sure you are not logged in and start watching a video. Once you are finished visit the YouTube History page. You should see that video listed there along with other videos that you have watched in the past while logged out of your Google or YouTube account.

YouTube uses cookies to monitor a user’s viewing history even if they are not logged in. Is that a privacy issue? I say it is, especially if you are not the only user who uses the computer.

To make matters worse, there is only one option to delete the viewing history. Visit the YouTube viewing history page. Actually, you need to visit the page twice if you watch videos when you are logged in and logged out.

You can delete individual videos by selecting them first and clicking the remove button afterwards, or all videos with a click on the clear all viewing history button.

This triggers the following prompt where you have to confirm the removal.

If you are never logged into Youtube or Google when viewing videos on YouTube, you can clear the viewing history automatically by deleting all YouTube cookies regularly (for instance on shutdown of the browser). Check out How To Clear Individual Cookies In Google Chrome or Selectively Block Cookies on Internet Explorer and Firefox In Realtime).

Users who are logged into their account when they view videos need to clear the viewing history manually regularly if they are concerned about their privacy.

There is another option for users who do not need a YouTube account but want to view videos. The core issue here is that YouTube will record the history when they are logged into other Google services. One option would be to launch YouTube in private browsing mode. Chrome users could use the Ghost Incognito extension to automate that process. This would log out the user automatically when logged in, and also clear cookies and other data on exit.

Does anyone know a better way of clearing YouTube’s viewing history? Let me know in the comments.

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";

You only get to see video ratings when you click on the video to open the play video screen on YouTube where you can watch the video.

That’s a usability issue, considering that many users would use the ratings of a video to determine whether they want to watch it or not. While it certainly should not be the only thing you are looking at, it can move your decision into a certain direction. Would you rather watch a video with 1000 positive and no negative ratings or one with no positive and 1000 negative ratings about a topic of interest?

YouTube Ratings Preview is a free extension for the Google Chrome web browser that adds video ratings to all YouTube pages. It does so elegantly and without changing the look and feel of the YouTube website.

Once installed you will notice a new tiny bar below each video on the video hosting site that displays the number of positive votes in green and the number of negative votes in red.

You can furthermore hover over the bar to see the positive vote count as a percentage value and the number of total ratings a video has received on the site.

Google Chrome users can download and install YouTube Ratings Preview from the Chrome Web Store.

Firefox users; Do you know of a comparable add-on for the web browser? Let me know in the comments.

For that we need to look at two things. First we need to download and convert YouTube videos and then add them to the song collection. There are lots of options to download YouTube videos, but in this guide I will concentrate on methods that make it as easy as possible.

First option is the web based service Youtube to Mp3. It is one of the easiest to use if you only want to download and convert a handful of YouTube music videos to mp3 to add them to your iTunes music collection.

All that needs to be done is to paste a YouTube video url into the form on the site. A click on the convert video button displays information about the video and an option to download the mp3.

Add-ons are available for Firefox and Google Chrome that display the download mp3 link next to YouTube videos directly making the process more comfortable.

The second option is a desktop program for Windows that can mass download YouTube videos and convert them to mp3 locally. Download and install Free FLV Converter from the developer website over at Koyotesoft. Make sure you pay attention to the installation dialog if you do not want a new search provider or search page in your default web browser.

Once installed enter a search term on the Search Video page and click on Search. This displays a list of YouTube video matches. Before you now start to download videos switch to the TubeQueue tab and select Audio only as the output format. This automatically converts downloaded videos to mp3 so that it is not necessary to convert the files manually. You can configure output settings in detail here. If you prefer a different output bitrate or audio codec you can configure it here.

Switch back to the Search Video tab and click the Download button to start downloading all the selected files. The program saves and converts the videos automatically so that you end up with audio files that you can import into iTunes.

Adding the new songs to iTunes is actually not a big problem. One could drag and drop songs or folders to the iTunes window to add them, launch them in iTunes or select File > Add File or Folder to iTunes.

The two methods describes above can be used to add new songs found on YouTube to iTunes or the local mp3 collection. Is it legal? That depends largely on your local laws. Consult a lawyer if you are unsure.

Sometimes I manage to stay focused, other times though my mind starts to wonder off which reduces my productivity considerably.

Google Plus, Google’s social networking site, supports embedded YouTube videos. All it takes is to paste the YouTube video url in to post it. That’s convenient and probably one of the reasons why YouTube videos are that often posted on the site.

That apparently was not enough. Google Plus users who visit the site now may have spotted the little YouTube button located on the right sidebar of the site.

A click on the button opens the text What would you like to play in a small search form.

It is basically a search form for YouTube videos. A search opens the first hit in a new (small) window on the screen. It is like the “I’m feeling lucky” feature that Google used for some time on their search engine.

The video is shown in the upper half of the screen, a playlist and now playing list in the lower half. The playlist is automatically populated with results.

The YouTube video player window can be minimized to play the videos in the background while working in the browser. It needs to be noted that this YouTube player works only if Adobe Flash is installed on the PC. Users who do not have Flash installed and who have enabled the HTML5 video beta on YouTube will see an error message even if the video plays fine on YouTube directly.

The YouTube button on the Google+ web page interestingly enough changes to a pause button when videos are playing. This makes the method more convenient than playing videos in another browser tab (because of that missing control option).

The integration of a YouTube video player on Google+ is yet another way to cross-promote Google services. Is the pause option reason enough to use the player? Negative aspects outweigh the positive ones in my opinion. This includes missing HTML5 video support and the lack of video selection controls but also the button itself which some users may see as yet another distraction on the Google Plus website.

What’s your take on the YouTube button on Google Plus?

YouTube Charts, which you can access here, offers various top listings. This includes the most viewed videos, most liked or most discussed videos. If you open the YouTube video charts page for the first time you will notice that it offers several filter menus to change what is shown on the page.

This begins with the All Categories pulldown menu at the top. Charts are displayed from all categories by default. You can change this to display the charts from one category only, for instance gaming, science & technology or sports only.

Two additional menus with filtering options are displayed right beneath that. The “most viewed videos” menu can be changed to display the most discussed, most liked, most viewed HD or top favorited videos instead. The Today menu to display the top videos of the week, month or even all time instead.

Each video is listed on the page with a large thumbnail, its title, uploader and the views that it has received. You can play individual videos or click on the Play All button to watch all videos in a playlist one after the other.

If you thought that was all then you are wrong. YouTube by default filters the videos it displays on the page by country. If you are from the US you may see different videos as someone from the UK, Germany or France.

You can change your location at the very bottom of the page. Here you can select one of the support countries or a worldwide listing.

If you ever wanted to know what’s hot in Israel, Australia or Taiwan then here is your chance to do just that. It is however likely that you will encounter many foreign language videos if you do that.

The charts on YouTube can be used to find out the next hot music gig, upcoming games that everyone is talking about or the latest gadgets. The charts are on the other hand mainstream charts which becomes especially apparent in the music category.

Probably the biggest issue with linked YouTube videos is the fact that users do not see any information about the video. They see a cryptic url http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co8IaSS0Z08 and do not know if it is worth watching the video.

The free userscript YouTube Link Title has two core features. It looks up YouTube video urls automatically and replaces their original link text with the video title. See the following two screenshots for a demonstration (first the standard display on Twitter, then the YouTube links with YouTube Link Title installed)

While that does not make it impossible to get rick rolled it certainly aids users in determining whether they would like to watch the video.

The second feature puts an end to pranks and rill rolls though. You can hover your mouse over YouTube links to see a still of the YouTube video. Even better, a left-click on that video link loads the full video right on the third party web page so that it can be played right away without having to visit the YouTube video portal to do so.

YouTube Link Title is a handy userscript for Internet users who encounter direct links to YouTube videos regularly. NoScript users need to enable scripts for the root domain to make the extension work on sites.

I have tested the userscript both in Firefox and Google Chrome, and it worked identical in both. Firefox users need to install Scriptish or Greasemonkey to install the script, Chrome users can install it right away. (thanks Vineeth)

For that though you need to be on the YouTube website, as there is no native way of subscribing to a news feed that you can read in a feed reader.

If you like to stay up to date with your YouTube feed without having to visit YouTube regularly to check for updates, you could try the Google Chrome extension YouTube Feed instead.

YouTube Feed basically displays notifications in the browser whenever new activities have been recorded in a user’s news feed. The only prerequisite is that you are currently logged in on YouTube. The extension picks up the news feed automatically from there and displays it in its interface.

The button in the Chrome address bar indicates the new feed items with a number. A click on the button opens a larger preview area where you see the last activities. Each activity is listed with the YouTube user’s name, activity and description.

A click on a link opens the page on YouTube. This is usually a YouTube video page that gets opened. You can also right-click the icon and select Options to open a configuration screen.

Here you can modify which event types are monitored by the extension. You can for instance disable all event types but uploaded videos. This would mean that you would not get notifications about comments, likes, ratings or favorites anymore. You can also select to receive notifications only from friends or subscriptions or keep the default settings and receive notifications from both user groups.

The remaining options modify the polling interval, the maximum number of feed items to retrieve and show and whether videos should be opened in their own tab in the browser.

Chrome users who are active on YouTube may want to take a closer look at YouTube Feed, as it can be a faster and more elegant way of staying on top of activities on the video portal. YouTube Feed can be installed directly from the Chrome Web Store.

Google yesterday announced on the official YouTube blog that they have added editing options on YouTube. These editing options become available for all users and all uploaded videos of a particular user on the site.

When you open one of your videos on YouTube, you see a new Edit Video link at the top next to Edit Info there.

A click on that link opens an edit video screen on Youtube that auto-plays the original video and the edited video on the screen. Video editing options are displayed in tabs on the page. The Quick Fixes tab for instance can be used to trim and stabilize the video, to rotate it left or right, to auto-correct lighting and color, and to make changes to lighting, coloring and saturation of the video.Each change is highlighted directly in the preview area.

The Effect tabs offers access to filters that can be applied to the video. This includes a Black and White effect, Sepia or a cartoon effect. It is unlikely that many YouTube video uploaders will make use of those effects. They do not really add anything to the video, but make them harder to watch. Still, there may be users that will make use of the Neon Pink or Green filters, and if it is only to annoy the hell out of their friends.

The Audio tab finally offers to add or exchange the audio track of the video. There is unfortunately still no option to use multiple songs for a video. That’s a issue if the selected audio track is shorter than the video play time.

Here is a quick video that Google made to demonstrate the functionality. Please note that the video is not showing the right interface.

Most video uploaders will still use third party software for their video editing needs. The options on YouTube are nice for quick limited edits though.

If you do not want your friends to find out that you have a secret crush on Justin Bieber, you may want to make sure that the history is deleted by the time they use your computer. Plus, you may reduce the amount of data that Google has stored about you at the same time.

It needs to be noted at this point that it is not possible to access another YouTube user’s video watch list. You should also make sure to log out of public computers so that no one gets access to your data.

There are actually two ways to find out about videos that a user has watched on YouTube. First by looking at the my viewing history page on YouTube which is only available if you are still logged in on YouTube. Second by looking at the browser cache. The second method works for as long as the browsing history is not deleted manually or automatically.

Here is how you delete both histories.

1. Delete YouTube Viewing History

Go to the YouTube website and log in if you have not done that already. Locate your username in the upper right corner and click on the Videos in the menu that opens up. You can alternatively open the following page directly. The page lists all the videos that you have watched on YouTube.

You can remove individual videos from your history by selecting them and clicking the Remove button afterwards, or all videos with a click on Clear all viewing history.

The browsing history of your web browser is the second location where others might find out about the videos that you watched recently on YouTube. You basically need to clear your browsing history and cache to make sure that no one can take a look at the data.

The Login Helper website has a nice guide called Web Browser Maintenance that explains how you do that in all popular browsers.

Back then it was not clear if and how embedded players would benefit from the design change. A post on Friday revealed that YouTube plans to roll our a dark player design for YouTube embeds from August 10 on. From that day on, all embedded YouTube videos will sport a new dark player design.

The design change can be problematic on websites that use a lighter theme. YouTube for exactly this situation has added two new player parameters to the YouTube embedded player.

The new theme parameter defines the overall theme of the embedded player. Available options are dark or light. The color parameter on the other hand defines the color of the time bar which can either be red or white.

The default theme and color is set to dark and red. A total of three additional designs are available.

If you do not want the default dark themed played to show up on your site, you need to modify the player code manually. This could be problematic for webmasters who have embedded lots of YouTube videos on their web properties. Probably the best option for those webmasters is to create a script that modifies all embedded YouTube scripts on the website automatically.

The code to embed YouTube videos looks like this. Take notice of the parameters theme and color in the video url.

<iframe width="560" height="349"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9h1swNWgP8Q?theme=light&color=red"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Here you define the theme and color that you want to be displayed on your website. What’s your take on the new YouTube layout and embedded player layout? Good change, bad change?

Probably the most unique feature of them all is the option to control the video volume with the mouse wheel. An on screen display indicates the current volume whenever the mouse wheel is used while the mouse hovers over the video. The mouse wheel volume control is compatible with both Flash and HTML5 videos, and works directly on YouTube and third party sites.

You scroll down to with the mouse wheel to decrease the volume and up to increase it. The extension adds three new control button to the video page. You see them next to the share and flag buttons. The first button enables cinema mode which darkens all of the screen but the video. The second expands the window size to full screen for a better viewing experience, and the last opens the extension’s options.

Here it is possible to change the OSD type and color, or disable it completely. It is furthermore possible to enable the Auto HD mode which will play YouTube videos in HD automatically if available, to stop the auto play feature of videos on YouTube, to hid the player controls and to enable the auto replay feature.

The fact that the mouse cursor needs to be on top of the video is somewhat of an usability issue. This can be resolved by switching to full screen video mode, which unfortunately cannot be set to automatic.

Chrome users who want to try the Magic Actions for YouTube extension can install it directly from the Chrome web store.

What features are you looking for in a YouTube extension?