Learn to use YouTube like never before

YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is the single most popular video collection on the internet with over a hundred hour of video being uploaded every minute. It was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. But despite its international popularity most users are unaware of its full potential. This is where your rest of the day is spent after Facebook and twitter. Here are bunch of must know shortcuts, features on YouTube to help you get the most out your video experience.

 

Mind boggling addictiveness of YouTubeTV: Google Leanback 

(www.youtube.com/tv)

Introduced under the popular title Leanback, it’s simple – TV on the internet featuring not only premium content from studios and networks but also homemade content from across the globe. You can watch YouTube on your TV without searching. It really feels like you are channel surfing — and it’s fast. The feature uses your profile and viewership data to create an endless stream of content tailored to your tastes.

leanback-youtubetv

It is created keeping in mind user comfort and visual aid. The elegant and user friendly design can be accessed on the internet TV’s tablets and other mobile devices to provide seamless access to YouTube content. YouTubeTV allows you to “leanback” and access content recommended for you or browse through various categories such as Comedy, Politics or simply try the Trends. The feature is best viewed on larger screens with a valid YouTube profile. The intention is to position YouTubeTV as a reasonable alternative to normal television viewing.

 

Discover Music 

(www.youtube.com/disco)

youtube-disco

It is really hard to find good music with this overflowing internet storage that’s why for those of us who love using YouTube as a music source, Disco offers a neat way to make automatic playlists for our favorite bands, artists and performers. Just enter the name, click “Disco!” and YouTube will take you to a top 100 playlist of songs. They will crank up your mood while you do rest of your computer stuff.

 

Learn how to search!

Yeah, you have read it right. I am going to teach you how to search. I know most of you are doing this on internet even before learning how to ride a bicycle. YouTube is big, really big. With over six billion hours of content streaming every month, it’s hard to sometimes find what you want. Using YouTube’s search engine can only get you so far and it helps to know a few tricks that can make the process more effective.

  • Add the “allintitle:” tag before entering any search term. So if you’re looking for the Google Nexus videos, simply input “allintitle: Google Nexus”.
  • If you want to exclude specific terms from the results use the excluding tag. E.g. if you want to get all Nexus videos without Samsung in the title input “allintitle: Nexus -Samsung”.
  • If you’re looking for specific channel then all you need to add the word “channel” next to the keyword. E.g. “Nexus channel” for all Nexus related channels.
  • To find new or recently released videos add the words “today”, “this week”, “this month” after the keyword.
  • For pulling up videos in high definition add “HD” to your keyword.
  • You can also directly search for playlists. E.g. “Coldplay playlist”.
  • Full length videos by adding “long”.
  • And if you wish you can combine variations of these tags to search term. E.g. “Coldplay, long, HD, this week”.

 

Keyboard Shortcuts

If you are one of those guys, like me, who are lazy enough to even extend your hand to reach mouse than give these keyboard shortcuts a try. YouTube also has built in keyboard shortcuts that can not only save time but make it easier to work with videos. Most people know that the “spacebar” on their keyboard can be used to play/pause videos. Other intuitive buttons are:

  • Left/Right arrow button to rewind and fast-forward 5 seconds at a time
  • Up/Down to increase and decrease volume
  • The Home/End button to jump to the start and end of the video, respectively.
  • The number buttons of the keyboard take you to the 10 percent point of the video i.e. pushing 5 takes you to the 50 percent point and 8 takes to the 80 percent point.

 

Quick tip: One third party app to watch videos with friends simultaneously in synched, try “Sync-Video” (www.sync-video.com).

Create shortcut to modify registry files and add custom context menu

Have you ever wanted to create a shortcut which would speed up your registry editing skills ? or do you modify registry more frequently ? Here is a solution which will perform any task in less than 5 seconds. We will explain this tutorial by adding a custom option in windows Right Click Context Menu of a file. [Not Folder]

  • First, we’d launch Notepad or another text editor.
  • Next add this line at the top of file.

“Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00”

  •  After it add a blank line.
  • To create a key Directory in registry, add full path of it.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Open with Softnuke\command]

  • Now add name of key and its value in this format “”=”value”, value could be path of any file with which you want to open.

@=”notepad.exe %1”

  • %1 is used here to provide path of the specified file on which Right click is to be done and @ means default key in directory.

registry-shortcut-open-with-softnuke

  • Now save it as “softnuke.reg”. Always Save the file with the .reg file extension. You can double-click it to add the information to your registry.

A single .reg file can contain multiple entries, so you could have one .reg file that installs all your favorite shortcuts.

registry-shortcut-save

Now can use it the way you like, here is another example : Enable/Disable access of USB

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\USBSTOR\] “Start”=dword:4
  • Finally, to delete the folder and all its continents create a .reg file similar with (-)minus sign in front of its directory.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\USBSTOR\] “Start”=-

For any Queries please comment below.

registry-shortcut-context

Note: Users running earlier versions of Windows may want to substitute Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 with REGEDIT4.

How to Create Your Own Run Commands

The Run command on Microsoft Windows operating system allows you to directly open an application or document with just a single command instead of navigating to it’s location and double-clicking the executable icon. However, it only works for some of the inbuilt Windows programs such as Command prompt (cmd), Calculator (calc) etc.

So, have you ever wondered how to create your own customized Run commands for accessing your favorite programs, files and folders? Well, read on to find out the answer.

Creating the Customized Run Command:

Let me take up an example of how to create a customized run command for opening the Internet explorer. Once you create this command, you should be able to open the Internet explorer just by typing ie in the Run dialog box. Here is how you can do that.

  1. Right-click on your Desktop and select New -> Shortcut.
  2. You will see a “Create Shortcut” Dialog box as shown below

  3. Click on “Browse”, navigate to: Program Files -> Mozilla Firefox from your Root drive (usually C:\) and select “firefox” as shown in the above figure and click on “OK”.
  4. Now click on “Next” and type any name for your shortcut. You can choose any name as per your choice; this will be your customized “Run command”. In this case I name my shortcut as “ff“. Click on “Finish”.
  5. You will see a shortcut named ff on your desktop. All you need to do is just copy this shortcut and paste it in your Windows folder (usually “C:\Windows\”). Once you have copied the shortcut onto your Windows folder, you can delete the one on your Desktop.
  6. That’s it! From now on, just open the Run dialog box(Win+R), type ff and hit Enter to open the Mozilla Firefox.

In this way you can create customized Run commands for any program of your choice. Say ie for Internet Explorer, gt for Google Talk, vlc for VLC media player and so on.

To do this, when you click on “Browse” in the Step-3, just select the target program’s main executable (.exe) file which will usually be located in the C:\Program Files folder. Give a simple and short name for this shortcut as per your choice and copy the shortcut file onto the Windows folder as usual. Now just type this short name in the Run dialog box to open the program.