5 Amazing YouTube Keyboard Shortcuts You Didn’t Know!

One of the most popular websites for watching or streaming video content is YouTube. We all watch YouTube videos at some point in time of our days or nights. Now, if you use a laptop or a desktop to watch your YouTube content, then I have got some pretty useful keyboard shortcuts that can hugely decrease your interaction with the trackpad or your mouse.

Now, you might already know some of the basic ones like “Esc” to exit full screen and or “m” to mute the videos. However, there is an array of keyboard shortcuts that can make your YouTube experience much better. So with these keyboard shortcuts in the tip of your fingers, you can just sit back and control most of the operations on YouTube without your mouse or the trackpad of your laptop.

Earlier we covered some YouTube tricks for mobile app users showing how to exit a full-screen with a single swipe or how to set YouTube Music as the default media player for Google Maps. Well now, it’s time for the desktop or laptop users to get their treat. So, here you go desktop or laptop users, enjoy these awesome keyboard shortcuts.

Here are 5 Amazing Keyboard Shorcuts on YouTube

So, below are 5 pretty nifty keyboard shortcuts for YouTube that you might not know of.

1. Seek to a Certain Percentage of a Video

While watching a YouTube video, you can use your num-keys (0-9) to jump to a specific percentage point of the video. For instance, if you press 1, the video will jump to the 10% mark, and similarly, if you press 5, the video will start playing from the 50% mark.

2. Increase or Decrease Caption size

Now, for the videos that support captions (auto-generated or official), you can press “c” to toggle the feature. However, if you find your caption size not up to your preference point, you can use the “+” or “-” button on the upper row of num-keys to manipulate the size of the caption font.

Note: The “+” or “-” buttons that are there on the dedicated num-pad of keyboards would not perform the above functions. You have to use the “+” or “-” buttons that are there on the upper row of the QWERTY keyboard.

3. Start Playing the Next Video

This is a pretty simple yet useful shortcut and might become a life-saver when a video you don’t like starts playing. You can just press the combination of “Shift+N” to skip to the next video.

4. Increase or Decrease Playback speed

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes like to watch long tutorials or how-to videos in 2x speed. Well, it covers the whole video in half the time. So, I find this keyboard shortcut to increase or decrease the playback speed of the video quite handy.

To increase the playback speed of a video, just press “>” to increase the playback rate of a video. If you go overboard, you can then decrease the speed by pressing “<“.

5. Fast Forward or Rewind Videos by 10 Seconds

This keyboard shortcut might be of use when you want to skip or rewind like 40 or 50 seconds of a video. You just have to press “j” to skip 10 seconds or “k” to rewind 10 seconds. So, 4-5 taps on “j” or “k” can skip or rewind 40-50 seconds of the video. Pretty neat, huh?

Bonus: YouTube Trick to Seek More Precisely

Now, this is not a keyboard shortcut. However, this can be immensely useful if you like to watch long videos on YouTube. With this trick, you can seek long videos, videos that are more than 1 hour, with extreme precision.

This trick hides in the seek bar of the video itself. You can just take your pointer, click and hold beneath the seek bar and slide up to reveal a much wider seek bar that can help you with precise seeking. This only works for the videos with longer than usual duration and it completely makes sense.

So, these were some of the keyboard shortcuts for YouTube that you might not know of. Now that you know, you can start using these for a better, mouse/trackpad-free YouTube experience.