8 Tricks About YouTube You Shouldn't Miss

YouTube, headquartered in San Bruno, California, USA, was founded by three former PayPal employees in February 2005. One year later, Google bought it for US$1.65 billion. It is the largest video-sharing website with estimated 1.000.000.000 unique monthly visitors followed by Netflix (150.000.000 visitors) then Vimeo (130.000.000 visitors); and the third most popular site after Google and Facebook. 

Statistically speaking, YouTube has over 4 billion videos viewed on a daily basis and more than 3 billion hours of video watched monthly. The number of videos uploaded to the site in one month is far greater than the 3 biggest US networks built in 60 years now. The traffic that comes outside the USA represents 70% as far as it is localised in 85 countries with 76 languages available. In 2011, the site recorded more than 1 trillion views which are equal to almost a 140 views to every person on this planet.

As we can see, YouTube has an enormous number of videos that varies from comedy, news, tutorials, blogging to movies, games, concerts, streaming and live events and so on. Still, we can learn more and more about it. 

Here I am sharing with you a couple of tricks and sites that allow you to manipulate YouTube videos whichever way you want.

1. Load Videos Much Faster.

If your internet speed is not as good as you want it to be, you are probably not able to watch higher in quality than 360p. There used to be a feature named Youtube Feather Beta with basic User Interface (taking away things like expandable share boxes, collapsible comments, and other settings) that makes the videos loads much more faster. It did exist only for experimental purposes (Beta) 

So What we need to do here is to Block IP addresses used by Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) on Windows. When you watch a video, you're in fact watching a cached video served by a CDN, rather than directly from YouTube. Since the connection speed is different with CDNs, the videos would load more slowly. To watch the videos directly on YouTube and getting a faster loading time, we need to block the IP address ranges used by CDNs.  
Go ahead with these steps:

• Open the Command Prompt.
• Copy and paste this command into the cmd: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”YouTubeTweak” dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
• Hit "Enter" and close the Command Prompt window.

If you are a Mac user, try the following:

• Open Terminal.
• Enter this command:sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 173.194.55.0/24 in  then click "Enter"
• Type in your admin password.
• Input this command: sudo ipfw add reject src-ip 206.111.0.0/16 in then click "Enter" and close Terminal

Now you should be able to have YouTube videos loading quicker than before.

2. Play Videos In Slow Motion.  

As you know, you can simply adjust the speed of a video from the video settings as shown in the screenshot below; But, using space bar in your keyboard allows you to play/pause the video. Find out what happens if you hold it down.

3. Navigate With Your Keyboard Only.

Do you care about turning your YouTube into a mainly keyboard interactive site?

Check out your brand new YouTube user interface now with LeanBack functionality. The latter was made to have easier content access on connected TV's but you are also able to use it on your computer to search for videos now using just the arrows and enter keys on your keyboard.

To select any category of videos you would love to watch, hit the left arrow button in your keyboard and there should appear a menu for different video groups.

4. Download The Video In an mp3 Audio File.

A great deal of music videos are in there on YouTube; and we often want to have them stored in our devices but just as an audio file like mp3. We can search the net and find that song already on youtube but what if we want to only listen to that specific video which only exist on YouTube? 
Here's what to do:

*Copy the URL of the video you want to convert.

*Log on to Convert2mp3 website and paste the video link on the specified area

 You can select the extension of the audio file you want it converted or simply    let it as mp3 by default. 

*Once the video is successfully converted, hit the "download" button.

5. Download Your Videos In Any Extension.

I have previously talked about how to download YouTube videos as well as Facebook as fast and easy as ABC. You can check it out

So, to proceed to get your favorite videos, all you have to do is to just replace “youtube” with “ssyoutube” in the URL and paste it in your address bar. Once you do that, you will be redirected to SaveFrom site where which you can choose to download the video in any quality available.

6. Bypass Registration On Particular Videos.

There are quite many videos that one cannot watch unless you sign in with your Google account. In fact, YouTube is verifying the age of the user which is the reason behind signing in/up for YouTube account. To bypass it, simply replace “youtube” with “nsfwyoutube” in the video URL and paste it in your address bar to bypass age restriction.

7. Transform YouTube Videos Into An Animated Picture.

You are watching some funny videos and it happens that a specified video caught your eye and thought of sharing a sequence of it as an animated image (Gif). So, you are on the right place to get that done. While you are on YouTube watching the video, just replace “youtube” with “gifs” in the URL as in the screenshot below.

Once you change it and hit "Enter", you will be redirected to the site where you can get your Gif image. Adjust the start time of your video before you convert it then click on "create Gif"

8. Watch The Latest Videos In Ultra High Definition 8k.

And last but not least, after full HD resolution (1080p) and 4k (2160p), we are discovering 8k UHD videos with the highest resolution existing in digital television and digital cinematography up to 4320p!

You should know if your computer is not equipped mainly with the latest graphics cards (and processors), you might not be able to watch those videos accurately. They might not even run on some old computers. 

May you wish to have a look at a couple of these videos and find out yourself.

These are some YouTube tricks (apart from #8) I found that might be useful while on the site knowing that there quite more other tips. Feel free to share some other noteworthy stuff in the comments.