Question Any dial for fine control of youtube video playback?

[tablespoon]

Hello, quiet often I need to rewind some videos during playback. Problem is that if I use the mouse pointer to click on a restart time frame, often I have to watch back more than I need to. Is there some kind of hardware dial which I could use for fine forward/backward playback control? Even better if it is wireless.

 

[mindless1]

I don't think that would work well because of how much latency youtube has, that trying to do fine control would just cause latency after latency to the point where it's not worth the bother, possibly even worse.

Personally I'd just download the videos, and play from an SSD.

You did not mention why you "need" to do this. Can we have more context?

You really need a local copy of the videos on a high performance storage media to have what you want.

 

[tablespoon]

I don't think that would work well because of how much latency youtube has, that trying to do fine control would just cause latency after latency to the point where it's not worth the bother, possibly even worse.

Personally I'd just download the videos, and play from an SSD.

You did not mention why you "need" to do this. Can we have more context?

You really need a local copy of the videos on a high performance storage media to have what you want.

I follow some youtube tutorial videos to learn how to use some software. I need to keep reminding often to follow those tutorials step by step.

I took out a Logitech keyboard with media keys on it. Although I can use F8 to pause and play video and the volume up and down keys work, the forward and backward keys do not work. When I pressed F8, F10 or F11, the corresponding key is highlighted on the top left of my screen but the forward and backward keys were dimmed and non-responsive even I pressed them. Tried one more Logitech keyboard but same issue. Anybody knows how to fix this? I am using youtube via the Edge browser. Same issue under Chrome.

 

[mindless1]

I don't have the windows software programming vocabulary to explain in great detail why that's not going to work, but the generic answer is those keys are for a media player software's specific functions and cannot (as is) be mapped to a mouse position on a webpage with variable size to cause the clicks needed to make it happen. If on the other hand, this specific functionality is added to the Logitech driver, it might be possible but AFAIK it hasn't been.

However if you download the video as already suggested, and launch it in a media player, your odds of being able to do that with the keyboard go way up. Some media players have allowed dragging the youtube webpage link into them to play the video, though I recently tried that with MPC-BE and while it used to work, it no longer works to seek, only to play the video linearly and the video cuts out with only audio advancing if you try. Downloading the video first, still works properly in MPC-BE.

 

[tablespoon]

What is the best way to download youtube videos to my computer? In the past, there were a few good websites that could get the job done after we provided the urls and save format. However, they are no longer available.

 

[mindless1]

I have not kept up with "all" the ways, nor the best. There are some browser add-ons specific to youtube, and some which handle as many sites as conform to some standards and/or the developer has added support for, and then there are some (almost, since you still need the browser to get the URL) standalone apps, both web based, and client side based.

Google Search

I forget the name of the browser add-on I was using, but the developer stopped updating it and either a newer browser version or youtube changing something, broke it.

I think I have (or had) Video Download Helper add-on to Firefox, but eventually found it a bit limiting, and it does not support Youtube downloading with Chrome browser because google won't allow it in their web store if it does.

Next I was using 4K Video Downloader app but the free version, which stopped supporting multiple simultaneous downloads. Finally I switched to JDownloader2 app, which is very full featured and works great, with very frequent developer updates, but there is a bit of a learning curve to it, if you don't want to accept the defaults, things like which resolution, framerate, and codec version of each video you want to get.

There are lots of other tweaks I made to JD2 over time as well, but it has a built in plugin for youtube that you can make adjustments on. You might try JD2 with the defaults and see if it does what you need (since it's freeware), then only change what you need to.

 

[mindless1]

Another option is just click the Theater Mode icon under the video, to make it stretch to the width of your browser window, then have the browser window maximized, on a very large monitor, which effectively gives you a lot longer seek bar to click on, to help click on a more precise area/time.

 

[xbliss]

Hello, quiet often I need to rewind some videos during playback. Problem is that if I use the mouse pointer to click on a restart time frame, often I have to watch back more than I need to. Is there some kind of hardware dial which I could use for fine forward/backward playback control? Even better if it is wireless.

I've been looking for sometime similar that has Wheel/ Jog Dial kinda thing - usually these work with Video Editor software etc.
But not sure how much / how well they play with YouTube (or similar Web streams).

Amazon.com

Try and let me know as well.

I asked their CC/ Support and they said if there's shortcut keys it could be worked.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7631406?hl=en

Would love to see a video showing how well this plays out.