YouTube Playback Tips and Keyboard Shortcuts

While watching YouTube videos on your Mac (or PC) you can use a variety of onscreen and keyboard controls. Learn how to navigate by chapter, speed up or slow down playback, use picture-in-picture, view transcripts and more.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some tips for watching YouTube videos.
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So chances are you are watching this video at YouTube. If you are using a Desktop or Laptop Mac you're watching them in a browser. There are lots of controls, some of them really well hidden, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to help you when you're watching YouTube videos. 
This is what it may look like when you're watching a YouTube video in the Safari web browser on a Mac. So at the bottom you've got all of these controls here. You've got the Play Pause button here. You've got the button to go to the next video. You've got your Mute control and your Volume control here. It also shows you the time that you're currently at, in this case 1 minute 26 seconds into a 9 minute 52 second video. Then if the video has chapters you're going to see the Chapter Name that you're currently on right here. Notice also the timeline is broken up into chapters. If you move your pointer over the timeline it will show you the name of each chapter as well as a preview of the frame that you're pointing at. You've got a button here to turn on Captions or Subtitles. 
Then you've got a Settings button. There are a lot of things you can do here in the Settings. For instance you can change the playback speed. If I click in here I can choose Normal, which is 100% of the speed. But I could also choose something a little slower, like 75% or faster 125%. I can click Custom here if I don't like those numbers and maybe go to 5% faster or 5% slower. You can also go here to further customize subtitles. So here you might see a list. Maybe one autogenerated by YouTube and another one professionally typed. You can also go to Options here and there a ton of ways you can customize how this looks. For instance you can change the Font, the Font color, the size, the background color. All sorts of things to get this to look just like you want. 
Now there are also some hidden controls here. If you click on the three dots button here under the video you'll get Show Transcript. This brings the transcript up here at the top right. You can scroll through it without having to view the video. So you just read the video. You can also click anywhere and it will jump right to that part of the video. You can also click up here and toggle time stamp to get rid of the time stamp if you like. You also usually have the ability to Search the transcript to find some text in the video. I believe it doesn't work for autogenerated text but here's one of my videos which has a regular transcript and you can see how I can search in here for some text and it will find it and you could see it bolded. You can also translate regular transcripts. Not the autogenerated ones but you can translate say this one by going to Settings and then going to Subtitles and then select Autotranslate and then go to the language that you want. So let's pick French and you could see the translation here. Just a computer generated translation so it is not going to be perfect. 
Now another important setting here is Quality. You can click on this and see a list of video resolutions. Now the top one is going to be whatever the original video was uploaded as. So if you only see 1080p as the top that means that the video is that quality. You can't go any higher than it. In this case 4K is the quality of this video. But I can choose a lower setting if I want to save bandwidth or if I notice I'm having trouble streaming at a higher bandwidth. The Auto Setting though should do this automatically. YouTube should recognize the bandwidth that you've got and automatically go to a lower resolution if you can't use a higher resolution with your current bandwidth. 
Now you have a lot of different controls here for how the screen looks. You can go to a miniplayer here and that puts the video at the bottom right and takes you to the YouTube homepage where you can continue to browse. If you want to get out of this you can click here to expand or here to dismiss the video. You also have Theater mode which will keep you here on the page with all of the information and controls and comments and everything but it will take the video from side-to-side. Click here to exit it. You can also go to Full Screen mode which just shows the video. There's nothing left of the page. You saw all the controls here at the bottom. To Exit this you would click here. On a Mac you're going to have AirPlay controls here. So you send this video, say, to an Apple TV or use some AirPlay Speakers to play the audio.
Now let's go back to the Timeline here. You can, of course, click anywhere you want in the Timeline. You can drag the Playback Head to anywhere that you want. You can Move the pointer as the video is playing to see what is in another part of the video and click to jump to it. But also at the bottom here you have the name of the current chapter. If you click on that you will now get a list of all the chapters here at the right. You can scroll through that to see all the chapter names and times at which they start and thumbnails for them. So if you want to jump to one you can just click on it and it will jump right to the beginning of that chapter. To Dismiss this click the X button there. 
There are actually more hidden controls if you Control click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad. If you do it one time then you get a YouTube context menu. You can set the video to loop over-and-over which is great if it is, say, a relaxation video or music video. You can also not only copy the URL for this video, which you can just do by copying up here, but you can also copy the URL with the current time added. So you can send it to a friend and have the video start at exactly this time. In this case 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Now there is also a second Context Menu. If you already have this menu up and you Control click, right finger or two-finger click again then you get the Mac's Context Menu. Not the YouTube one. This allows you to enter a different full screen mode. This full screen mode is the regular Mac video playback full screen mode. You can see the Mac controls here at the bottom, not the YouTube ones. Click here to Exit that. If we go back in again Control clicking twice I can also enter the Mac's Picture-In-Picture mode which will now bring the video up here. I can now Exit YouTube, I'll just Hide Safari, and you can see I can now work in other apps while the video continues to play. Click here to Return to the page in the browser. 
Now let's look at some Keyboard Shortcuts. You may know that you can use the left and right arrow keys to move forward and back in the video. It moves by 5 seconds at a time. But you could also use the J and L keys to jump 10 seconds at a time. So L goes forward 10 and J goes backwards 10. You may ask, well what's the k key in the middle for. Well, that is actually Pause and Resume which, of course, you can also do with the Spacebar. Now if you want to move by one frame at a time you can do that with the period key to go forward and the comma key to go back. So just one small frame. Now those same keys with Shift are Greater Than and Less Than. You can use that for Playback controls. So Shift and then the Period will increase the playback speed and you can see the indicator there at the top. Let's use k to Play and you can see I can go much faster and then you can use Shift Comma or Less Than to decrease the playback speed.
Now you can also jump around in the video with the Number keys. Zero jumps to the beginning and then 1 will jump to 10% into the video, 2 to 20%, 3 to 30 all the way to 9 to 90%. If you want to move around by Chapters use the Option key and then the left and right arrows. That will go to the beginning of each chapter. There's also keyboard shortcuts for video size. T goes to theater mode and then T will take you back. Also F goes to Full Screen mode and F will take you back as well. I goes to the miniplayer mode and i will take you back as well. For Volume you could do M for Mute and you can see how it mutes the video. You can also use the Up and Down Arrow keys to adjust the volume. But it doesn't really work well on Macs in Safari. I'll go down here and you can see how it wants to scroll down on the page. If I click on the video here to Play or Pause now I've given focus to this video and not the whole page and now the Up and Down will work to change the volume. 
There are also some keyboard controls for Close Caption and Subtitles. You can use C to turn Close Captions On and Off. When you're On you can use the Plus and Minus buttons. It's really the equals and minus buttons to increase the size and decrease the size. W will cycle through the opacity and O for the brightness of the text. Now I know some of you are going to ask, is there a place I can go to see all of those keyboard shortcuts or maybe something I can printout to look at. Well, you don't need to do that. All you need to do is to remember one keyboard shortcut I haven't told you about yet. That's Question Mark. ? Just use Shift and the slash key ? on your keyboard and it will bring up this list of all the keyboard shortcuts right there while you're watching YouTube videos. There are more than just this. You can scroll down to see the rest. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 2 Responses to “YouTube Playback Tips and Keyboard Shortcuts”

brad
9 months ago
This is one of those videos that slower speeds are really handy for some of us old pharts!
Thanks again, Maestro!
John Russell
That certainly opened up some new watching possibilities. If you can remember the whole list of keyboard shortcuts for all the apps you use, you are even more of a super hero that I originally thought! :-) Whew!
YouTube Playback Tips and Keyboard Shortcuts

Comments: 2 Responses to “YouTube Playback Tips and Keyboard Shortcuts”

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