Improve Your YouTube Experience- Chrome Add-Ons

01.ChromeTunes 

   YouTube is a great music source, and while it’s pretty easy to find or create music playlists to listen to, the task becomes even easier with this simple extension. ChromeTunes turns YouTube into a bona fide music player, taking away the videos, the comments, the suggestions, and even the need to load youtube.com. After installing ChromeTunes, click on the red play button to start listening to YouTube music.

The ChromeTunes player has two parts: the player itself, which you can see above, and the settings layer, where you can add or remove playlists, search YouTube, and more. The player itself comes loaded with two sample playlists which you can easily move between using the bottom playlist switcher. The player comes complete with all the usual options such as repeat, shuffle, reload and share. You can also view more video information such as views count, likes, and more.

 

   To add new playlists, either click the search and play button on the bottom right, or click the cogwheel button on the top right. From here, you can search YouTube for more playlists and add them to ChromeTunes.

Hovering over the extension’s button will reveal the name of the song currently playing, the artist, and the song’s length.

02.YouTube Preview

   So you’re watching your daily dose of YouTube videos, going from one video to the next using the ever-present right sidebar. YouTube’s sidebar is a pretty good source of related and recommended videos, but as good as it is, you often find yourself clicking on videos that look promising, only to find out they’re not really what you were looking for. Sounds familiar? YouTube Preview is a handy little add-on that can help you find out more about a video just from looking at the thumbnail.

   The first thing you’ll notice are the colorful green and red bars under each thumbnail. These are indicators of how popular a video is, and represent how many people liked this video out of all the users who’ve rated it. If you hover over the thumbnail, the thumbnail itself will start playing, and you’ll see a small walkthrough of the video. While it’s not like watching the full video, it’s much more informative than just seeing a static thumbnail.

03.YouTube Video Deck

    Are you a subscription fiend? If you have many subscriptions on YouTube, keeping track of them all can become somewhat tiresome. YouTube Video Deck is a Chrome app that brings all your YouTube subscriptions under one roof – sort of like Google Reader for YouTube subscriptions. After logging in, you can add all or only some of your subscriptions, and receive notifications when a new video is uploaded.

You can set up the layout to your liking, and check the app every time you’re bored for the newest fixes from your favorite YouTube accounts.

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Twitter Launches Vine

   Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard rumblings of Twitter launching some kind of video sharing service, and it looks like those rumors have come to be in the form of a cool new service called Vine. For the time being, using Vine to create videos is only available with the Vine iOS app, but Twitter has made it clear that Vine will be coming to other platforms soon.

In keeping with Twitter’s theme, videos created on Vine are very short. In fact, videos can only be six seconds or less. This will keep long-winded videos off the service, and just like tweets themselves, everything needs to get to the point. Between the short video clips, and the fact that the app is able to record sound, it should be easy enough for Vine users to get their point across in the time allotment.

Creating videos is as simple as holding a finger on the screen to record, and letting go to stop. You can stop as few or as many times as you want, so you can record one continuous six second video or a bunch of short clips. It only records while touching, so you can change the shot and tell a brief story though the videos without actually having to do any editing.

The videos are embedded directly in Tweets, just like a photo shared on a supported image service. Videos can be played on the Twitter website or on the Twitter mobile app. However, on the mobile application, the videos do not loop as they do on the desktop version of Twitter.

Here’s an example of a Tweet made with Vine:

https://twitter.com/sideox/status/294511424808550400

One thing Twitter neglects to mention in its official announcement of Vine is that users can also share videos on Facebook. However, my Vine posts were not showing up on my Facebook Timeline. The app comes with its own social network, so users can share videos within the Vine network even if they don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account.

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