Solved! Simple basic question about youtube videos

[Muse]

Watching Youtube videos SOMETIMES I can pause/restart a video I'm watching by hitting the spacebar. Sometimes I cannot. Of course, having that ability to pause/restart by hitting the spacebar is hell of convenient compared to reaching for my mouse (or trackpad) and clicking the || or |> icons.

Why is this behavior to-me apparently inconsistent? What can I do to restore the spacebar's functionality with respect to pause/restart? I figure it's there because watching the same video sometimes the functionality is there, other times it is not. What am I not getting?

Edit: What I also find inconsistent is whether or not the [<--] and [-->] keys act as N second rewind or N second forward actions, respectively.

How do I control those functionalities?

 

[balloonshark]

If I go to youtube and click help on the lower left hand side and search for keyboard it says this.

If you're using the new computer experience, you must click the video player before using keyboard shortcuts. To return to the classic computer experience, go to the profile picture

and click Restore old YouTube.

I have no idea if that is the problem or not or if clicking on the video player will restore keyboard shortcut functionality or not. The new computer experience seems to be some kind of experimental feature.

 

[CZroe]

The video player element of the page needs "focus" or else the Spacebar will do what it does on any other web page. If it doesn't already have focus (AKA "selection") you need to click on the video or Tab your selection to it in order to give it focus, just like you'd click in a text box to give it focus... where Spacebar will actually type a space rather than Play/Pause your video. See? It's all about what has focus (selection) for your keyboard events.

If you click anything else on the page you move the keyboard focus away from the video. Obviously the video doesn't continually pause and resume playback as you type spaces in a comment, since only one element of the page at a time can have focus and respond to the Spacebar.

Of course, clicking the video to restore focus to that typically makes it pause, so you need to click a second time or hit Spacebar to resume if moving focus was your only intent. Anticipating this and clicking twice rapidly will pause/resume and leave the player with keyboard focus as intended but it will also switch between full screen and page view, since that is what double-clicking the video is supposed to do (whether you intended it or not). It really is a clusterf**k of UI sins!

 

[Muse]

Oh, man... great stuff! Thanks! I'm glad it wasn't just me being stupid... something I can do for sure. I've lived with Youtube confusion for a long time. I don't Youtube as much as a whole lot of people. Sometimes I think I should do more. A lot of great stuff there. I'm gonna try to get a better handle on the nuances. I'm right now in the middle of a few (at least two) Youtube videos... paused. I used to have issues with a paused Youtube video suddenly starting up and there's audio and I have no idea where it's coming from, a real serious situation when you have 9 windows open and an average of a dozen tabs/window! Lately it hasn't been happening. Maybe it's me and my system, maybe my browser (I'm using Firefox these days), maybe Youtube system has changed. ????

 

[Red Squirrel]

Sometimes the focus ends up being on a specific part of the player too like mute etc so it may still not work. You have to click right on the video itself at least once then it will get proper focus.

 

[balloonshark]

To be honest I didn't even know they had keyboard shortcuts before I saw this topic. I always use my mouse on my PC or 95% of the time I'm watching the youtube app on my tv with my nvidia shield or roku.

 

[Muse]

To be honest I didn't even know they had keyboard shortcuts before I saw this topic. I always use my mouse on my PC or 95% of the time I'm watching the youtube app on my tv with my nvidia shield or roku.

The left arrow is hell of useful when watching a Youtube video on your PC. It rewinds around 5 (10?) seconds for each key press. Spacebar pauses/restarts, also very useful. When that stuff is working, no need to grab the mouse most of the time. Miss something, just hit the [<--] key.