7 YouTube Tricks You Probably Don’t Know

Youtube is undoubtedly one of the most popular video streaming sites out there. Whether you want to check out some new music videos or find the latest tutorials to use a software or gadget, the first place that generally pops to mind is YouTube. Despite it being very popular and powerful there are some tricks and features that are still not known by most users.

This post intends to deliver tricks that will add more dimension to your experience on the YouTube platform, and allow you to enjoy some of the little-known shortcuts, hacks and special features you can use on Youtube.

Recommended Reading: Useful YouTube Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

1. Specific Start Time

If you want to share just a certain portion of a video with a user, you’ll notice that there is no official option to do this. Normally you have to inform others which minute they can pull to start from. Bet you didn’t know that there is a handy hack to send a link to a user or embed a certain portion of the YouTube video in your website. Skip the fluff and get to the good stuff.

Here is how it works. Consider the following Youtube Video URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec

After the URL link add #t=01m08s to set the starting point of the video at 1 minute and 8 seconds. Here is how it should look like:

To embed a portion of a YouTube video the process goes the same way. You simply have to add #t=01m08s to the embed code you get from the original video and paste it to your website.

Once a user plays the video, it will automatically start from the point you have specified in the embed code.

2. Auto Video Replay

There are certain times when you get obsessed with a Youtube video, whether it’s a really catchy song or a funny video. Isn’t it annoying to always have to hit replay everytime you near the end? Why not activate the looping feature?

The what now? Let’s use the same YouTube video. Just replace youtube with the textinfinitelooper in the URL and hit enter.

It will redirect you to another YouTube third-party platform where you are also provided with the option of looping selected portions of the video.

3. Auto High-Definition Video Play

Sometimes when you play a YouTube video the video quality has been set on default for you, usually at a lower quality video resolution. To prevent this from happening you can force the system to permanently play videos in an HD format.

Grab the extension called Magic Actions for Youtube available only for Google Chrome and Firefox. Enable the option Auto HD in the extension and select the video resolution you would like to be played automatically. You can also set the mouse wheel to scroll up (and down) the volume of the video.

Read Also: How To Disable YouTube Video Autoplay

4. Accurate Keyword Searching

There are a bajillion videos on Youtube so trying to find that specific Youtube video you want to watch is an adventure by itself. You might find yourself crawling through dozens of pages hoping to land the video you actually want to watch.

The solution for this time-consuming exercise is to add allintitle: before the keywords you are search for. What it does is basically provide you with only videos that include the chosen keywords.

5. Omit Keywords

You can opt for specific keywords to be in the search, or out of it. Let’s say you are searching for a tutorial about ‘register domain.’ Using the most conventional search form you will find tons of videos about how to register domain using Godaddy.

If you want to find other options that are not GoDaddy, you can always exclude the keyword from your search results i.e. ‘keyword -excluded keyword.’

Here is how it should look like.

6. Speed Checker

The most important race in the world is the red bar and the grey bar. Youtubers know what I am talking about. You can actually check the loading speeds of the video (if it makes you feel better, you know, knowing if the problem is with your connection, or the blasted video) by adding my_speed next to the address of YouTube Home Page.

If you can’t remember the URL extension, right click on any video and head to ‘Take speed test’.

You will get readings of your average video speed based on your location and can even compare speeds based on certain dates.

7. Watching Videos With A Slow Internet Speed

Youtube has released a robust feature called the ‘Feather Beta’. This feature is dedicated to users who want to run videos on a very slow internet connection. The system basically cuts down some bytes that limit the speed of video streaming in your browser.

To opt-in the feature you simply go to http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta and join the beta feature.

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Beautiful Weather Widgets For Your Android Home Screens

Keeping in mind that everyone has their own taste and preference in design, this compilation has a wide array of simple, complicated, elegant and cockpit-inspired weather widgets to choose from. Some include information like humidity, high and low temperatures, forecasts for the next few days and other functions you may be interested in. Let’s take a look at what this list has in store for us.

Clear Conditions HD. A small minimalistic widget showing current weather conditions through the use of UCCW app. [Free]

Weather Clock Full. A pretty display weather clock that is not too harsh on memory and comes at a small price. [$1.11]

Clock Weather Widget. Another simple beautiful weather app based on UCCW, with clock feature included. [Free]

Weather Forecast Widget. Want one with a forecast? This one gives you up to four days of weather condition. [Free]

EZ Weather HD Forecast. Get the highs and lows of daily temperatures and forecast of up to 7 days. [Free]

Weather Screen. Love live wallpapers? Pick an animation to add to your picture, on top of a clock and weather widgets to go a long with it. [$2.99]

Metro Clock And Weather Full. Pick a weather card with 5 European city themes with displays that change night into day (and vice versa) with every sunrise and sunset. [$1.19]

Sense V2 Flip Clock & Weather. Beautifully made Sense clock weather widget, with shortcut access to the alarm or World Time. [Free]

Weather+. This one is a multi-data weather widget for flip-clock fans. [$1.29]

Weather Pro Premium. On top of the regular features this one can also give you cached forecasts in case you can’t get online. [$1.28]

Weather Live. Get additional data like humidity, precipitation, pressure and visibility on top of a ‘feels like’ feature which tells you what the weather actually feels like outside. [Free]

BeWeather & Widgets Pro. Track your local weather through this app, change the default icon on its widget as you wish through its flexible customization features. [$1.99]

Go Weather Forecast & Widgets. If your a fan of go launcher products, try their weather app too since there is a huge slection of widget themes to try out. [Free]

Black Transparent System Widget. Find out the entire week’s weather condition, neatly put together in one semi-transparent widget or a single widget to represent the current weather condition. [Free]

Weather Widget. Although limited in weather locations, this one comes with a nicely made set of weather widgets, perfect for your home screen. [$0.92]

Pocket Weather Australia. Iff you live in Australia, this app will inform you of weather warnings to avoid incoming storms. [$1.80]

Eye In The Sky Weather. Simple, beautiful and easy to read weather widget with expandable notification. [Free]

Weather Cards. These cards tell it like it is, snowflakes for a snowing forecast, and clouds for a partly cloud one. The widget is based on UCCW. [Free]

Weather: Local Forecast, Radar. Clean and simple, the minimal use of colors keep the attention on the data. [Free]

Stencil Weather. Awesome weather icons keeping things real for users .[$1.59]

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Clean Your IOS Devices For Extra Space With PhoneClean

Running out of space in your iOS device? Try deleting some of the unused apps. But then we might need it later on, so that may not work for everyone. Hey, what about recovering some storage capacity by removing the space-hogging files? And you can do that easily with PhoneClean.

iMobie PhoneClean is a desktop tool which cleans up your iOS device to release some extra space back for use. It deletes files such as temporary files, cookies, script files, media files that failed to sync properly, and cached and offline files. PhoneClean is available for both Windows and Mac.

Clean IPhone, IPad, IPod Touch

PhoneClean is available for download here. Before starting to clean your iOS devices with PhoneClean, it is advisable for you to do an iTunes backup first. In case something goes wrong, you still have your iTunes backup to restore it to your device.

By connecting your device with PhoneClean it will show you the details of your device. PhoneClean allows you to choose which type of files that you want to scan (and subsequently delete) from the iOS device. There are four types of file:

• Temp and Junk files
• Cache and Off-line files
• Cookie and Script files
• Sync-failed Media files

As you can see for this review, our sample device has 19.19GB free space and 10.34GB used space. Let’s see how much free space we can recover after scanning.

Scanning can take up to a few minutes depending on your device capacity.

By clicking on the ‘arrow’ icon under Detail, a list of apps will be shown, along with the number of files it has and the sizes. Uncheck the apps that you do not want deleted. Go back and click onClean up when you are done.

After it finishes cleaning it will display the amount of space that has been recovered.

Conclusion

iMobie PhoneClean is a straight forward desktop tool that helps you to clear data and recover space just like how they described it on the website. After the clean-up, we discovered that all of our apps are like how it is before the clean-up and our accounts are all still logged in i.e. in perfect condition after the clean-up.

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How To Properly Backup And Restore Your IPhone Data

When you connect your iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes, you can immediately see the options to backup your data to your computer or to iCloud. Note that iCloud only backs up a few important things, while backing up to your computer backs up almost everything on your device.

Select either option, and click Backup. Then come back to this and select the second option for a complete backup.

You can select both backup methods through iTunes under the Summary tab of your device and it is recommended that you run the backup process manually by right clicking on your device and clicking on Back Up.

How To Backup And Restore Apps

To backup apps, use the Transfer Purchases option found when you right click your device on iTunes.

Doing this transfers and backs up all the apps installed on your iOS device to your computer. Since restoring your device from a backup does not restore apps, you can drag the apps transferred to iTunes back to your device.

How To Restore From Backup

Once you have a backup, you can easily restore most of the important information to a new or recently restored device. All you have to do is connect your iDevice to your computer and start iTunes. Right click on your device in iTunes and select Restore From Backup. Then select the latest backup and restore it.

When times get rough, it’s time to restore factory settings. ‘Restore Factory Settings‘ will wipe out all information from the iDevice, turning it brand new, like the first time it came out of the box.

Since the method is the same on any iDevice, you can check out our Quick Tip on how to Restore Factory Settings on an iPad Mini.

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How To Restore IPad Mini To Factory Settings [Quicktip]

It is just as simple to restore your iPad Mini without iTunes. Go to Settings > General > Reset and tap on Erase All Content and Settings.

You’ll then be asked if you want to continue; after the confirmation, your iPad Mini will reset and the Apple logo together with a loading bar will appear on screen.

Upon the start up, all content, apps, music, photos, and personal account information will be erased from the iPad Mini. And you’ll have to go through the process of setting up the device from scratch (choosing language, Apple ID, etc.).

2. Restore Factory Settings With ITunes

Start by connecting your iPad Mini to your desktop computer with the provided cable. Start iTunes. Locate your iPad Mini under ‘Devices’ on the left panel and click on Restore.

If this is your first time restoring, you’ll have to wait for the firmware file to be downloaded. Once it is downloaded, it’ll ask if you really want to restore. Confirm to proceed.

Once your iPad Mini starts up again, you’ll have a clean iPad Mini with the latest firmware installed.

More Troubleshooting Tips

Here are a few more handy tricks to troubleshoot your iPad Mini.

Force IPad Mini Reboot

If you find your iPad Mini frozen (hang) due to app failure and nothing you do changes anything on screen, you can try a force reboot.

Simultaneously hold down the top power button and center home button of the iPad Mini until you see a black screen. Remove your finger only from the home button. Continue pressing on the Power button until the Apple logo appears on screen.

Once it appears you can release your finger from the power button and wait for the device to start up.

This process of forcing a reboot will not delete any of your personal information from the iPad Mini. This is just a way to restart the device when it starts acting wonky.

Back Up Frequently

If you work on the iPad Mini or use it extensively to store your information, you should constantly backup your information. In the event you need to restore your device but still want all your personal information, you can choose to restore from a backup.

These same tips also work for all your iOS devices.

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Ultimate Windows Tweaker for Windows 7

Windows Tweaker is a freeware TweakUI Utility for tweaking and optimizing Windows 7 & Windows Vista, 32-bit & 64-bit. It can simply be downloaded and used as a portable application to customize your Windows to meet your requirements. With judicious tweaking, it can make your system faster, more stable, and more secure with just a few mouse clicks. The tweaker detects whether you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista installed and accordingly offers you the relevant tweaks only.

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Kgb compressor (converts 1GB to 1MB)

KGB Archiver is the compression tool with unbelievable high compression rate. It surpasses even such efficient compression tool like 7zip and UHARC in terms of the abilities. KGB Archiver uses AES-256 encryption to encrypt archives.

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