YouTube: dynamic always visible video player

Martin Brinkmann
Dec 8, 2012
Music and Video, Youtube
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5

When you visit YouTube to watch a couple of videos that have been uploaded to the site, and who does not nowadays, you may have noticed that the site lacks a couple of features that would make the viewing experience that more enjoyable.

The video player for instance displays always in the same size regardless of the size of the browser window. While you get buttons at the bottom of the video screen to make the video screen bigger or even display in fullscreen, it first needs to be activated manually, and second does not provide you with enough options in regards to fitting the video perfectly to the browser window.

There are other issues. The comments for instance are displayed below the video, which is fine I guess, but it also means that you cannot browse the comments and watch the video at the same time as you need to scroll down to access all the comments.

The userscript Unique YouTube Skin changes that by changing the layout of the video page on YouTube dramatically. As you can see on the screenshot below, it moves the video to the left and everything else to the right which effectively separates the video player from comments, title, description and other related information.

youtube unique skin

A core benefit of this is that the video remains visible on the screen at all times as both parts are completely independent from each other. You can browse the comments or leave a comment and watch the video at the same time.

It may take a couple of minutes of getting used to time at first as the layout causes quite some black space on the top and bottom of the video but that is caused mainly by the dynamic resizing that the author of the script added to it.

The video basically resizes dynamically with the browser window.  Whenever you resize the browser window the video will resize itself automatically to fit it perfectly which means that you will never come into a situation where the video is not fully visible on the screen.

It is an interesting solution that can be useful for you if you often browse the comments while watching videos on YouTube.

The one thing that feels strange about this is that the script requests to run on all sites, not only on YouTube. This is something that the developer may want to address in a future release.

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Comments

  1. mur_phy said on December 8, 2012 at 5:08 pm
    Reply

    Unless I did not see, please advise how to remove the script if the user does not wish to continue using it.

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on December 8, 2012 at 11:42 pm
      Reply

      You can uninstall it in the extensions in Google Chrome, or unser userscripts in Firefox.

  2. Frank D said on December 8, 2012 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    A wonderful script and a great find! It makes YouTube a pleasure to use instead of a chore.

  3. imu said on December 8, 2012 at 1:20 pm
    Reply

    Martin, have you seen the latest ‘Minitube 1.9’ ? Linux users can have it for free while Windowsers have to pay but anyway this is worth to bother as you can make it portable and use it everywhere :) plus it does cut away all the mess like ads scripts etc. simply lets you enjoy pure content.

    Best Regards

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