By – Jay McGregor, Forbes Contributor
YouTube: The aggregator of fail compilations, the disseminator of cat related humour and a beacon for everything viral.
Killing time on YouTube is the most productive way to be unproductive, but there’s so much more to it than salacious thumbnails and unrelated debates about political theory in the comments section.
Aside from a few easter eggs to please medium-core trekkies and Star Wars fans, there are some genuinely useful hacks that can enhance your YouTube viewing experience ten-fold. I mean, if you’re prepared to sign away three hours of your life by watching late-nineties wrestling videos, then you should do it in style, right?
Ever heard of YouTube Leanback? Or how about turning any video into a GIF? No? Then there’s so much more to show you. Here’s a run-down of my top five YouTube hacks:
1. Make any video into a GIF
You can turn any video into a GIF by simply adding “gif” just after the “www.” in the URL. For example “www.gifyoutube.com/watchx”
Once you type that in, you’ll be taken to a simple gif making tool page that lets you cut out a section of the video and export it.
Select the point at which you want to start the gif and then select how long it lasts, and you’re done. You’ve made a gif in a matter of minutes.
Watch my gif of Charlie Sheen’s alternative ice bucket challenge here
2. YouTube Disco
You already knew that you can use YouTube to stream music, but did you know it can be a DJ too? YouTube Disco automatically puts together a playlist of songs from your prefered genre or artist.
Go to www.youtube.com/disco and enter any artist, song, or genre and YouTube will populate a playlist of the most watched/popular videos from your search.
You can also set it to play the current top hits and it will tell what videos are most popular at the moment.
3. Slow motion
There are a couple of ways to slow down a YouTube video, with the simplest way being to hold down the spacebar during a video. This cause the video to rapidly play and pause, which creates a budget slow motion effect.
If, however, you want some more advanced controls, head towww.youtubeslow.com and enter your video’s URL into the specified field. You can then either speed up, slow down, play on repeat or set a loop.
By – Jay McGregor, Forbes Contributor
Original Post by Forbes.com