7 Useful YouTube Keyboard Shortcuts Even Your Grandparents Better Learn

I’ve spent about half of my quarantine on YouTube, so in the spirit of self-improvement, let’s learn to binge more efficiently.

Nobody has to know you had no clue these shortcuts existed, we’ll keep it between us. If anyone approaches, Ctrl + W closes your current tab. You can practice by opening an article and closing the tab so you remember.

1. Numbers 0–9

Play the video, and press any number key between 0 and 9.

If you press 0, you will be placed at the start of the video. If you press 1, you will be placed at 10% of the video. If you press 5, you will be placed at 50% or halfway through the video.

You get it, now percentage jump around and practice, you little hacker.

2. Arrows

If you just missed a moment in your video, the left arrow key will send you 5 seconds back.

The right arrow key hops forward.

The up & down arrow keys raise and lower the volume.

3. Spacebar

There is simply no greater joy than slapping the spacebar to pause a video, only to do it again to resume playing the video. Every time you scroll over to the click the play icon instead of using the spacebar, an angel develops carpal tunnel.

4. F(ullscreen) & M(ute).

F is for fullscreen. F again escapes fullscreen. M is for mute. M again works to unmute.

5. Playback Speed

If a video is too slow or too fast for your taste, you can easily adjust it to your liking by selecting your preferred Playback Speed in the small settings menu. Open the settings menu by clicking on the tiny gear/cog icon on the bottom right of the player.

The benefit of this is that if you just make it 1.25 times the normal speed (which is rather easy to get accustomed to) that means you’d be able to watch 100 minutes in just 80, saving you 20 minutes. This means I just saved you more than the entire time it took you to read this all and test the shortcuts.

Otherwise you can lower the speed slightly to .75 to try understand what is being said or viewed more clearly. I use that effect to learn languages by slowing down native speakers to understand what they are saying and how they pronounce it.

Test out speeding up and slowing down the fireworks, muting their sound, and of course enjoying them in fullscreen.

You can even shortcut this by pressing: Shift + > to speed up. Shift + < to slow down.

For practice, slow down these French interviews so they sound less like confusing native speakers and more like intelligible drunks.

6. C (closed captions)

Press C to start closed captions for the french language video.

In the settings (gear/cog) menu you can of course change the subtitles into different languages. Not all videos have closed captions , but most do. Sometimes they are auto-generated and provide comedic value when they fail to translate correctly.

Once the subtitles are visible:

Press the + key, the font size will increase. Press the - key, the font size will decrease.

7. Inspect each frame with . and ,

If you pause a video and press period (.) or comma (,) it will go back or forward a single frame.

This way you can closely inspect a moment in the video, maybe even take a screenshot of it.