TheQuantumByte

This is slightly hard to describe, but I just randomly stumbled across a nifty little ‘hack’, for lack of a better word, involving the viewing of YouTube videos. Of course, YouTube natively supports full-screen viewing of videos, but I personally do not like this as I am completely immersed in the video and can no longer see the other activities on my screen (such as new mail, etc). So I stumbled across this ‘hack’ that allows you to watch a YouTube video maximized in the browser tab you’re on. Check out the pic below if my description doesn’t make sense.

To do this, paste this code into your browser:

http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxxx&fs=1

Now go back to the desired YouTube video in its normal view, and copy the last 11 alphanumeric string in the “URL” box on the right side, or in the actual URL you see in the address bar of your browser. This random string is the identifier of that specific video.

Now paste that random string in place of the “xxxxxxxxxxx” in the code above, hit enter, and you’re good to go!

So, for example, if you want to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6SCc6A6Kck

The URL to go to is:

http://www.youtube.com/v/S6SCc6A6Kck&fs=1

Lee over at the MacOSXHints site, on the thread dedicated to this post/tip, wrote a nifty little javascript bookmarklet that allows you to click on to automatically convert the above tip. Add the following javascript link to your bookmarks bar:

javascript:(function(){var id;id=window.location.toString();id=id.replace(/^[^v]+v.(.{11}).*/,”$1″);window.location.href=”http://www.youtube.com/v/”+id+”&hl=en&fs=1″;;})()

Thanks, Lee!