Better YouTube Options For Google Chrome

When watching YouTube videos you may get tired of in-video adverts and hundreds of stupid reviews/comments. Or the page can be so full of distracting content that it makes it difficult to concentrate on the actual video.

However, you don’t have to put up with this. Take back control with YouTube Options, a clever extension for Chrome – disable annoying things in YouTube and configure it to always display content how and when you like.

YouTube Options – Most (not all) features also work with Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe, G4TV, FEARnet, Funny or Die, Hulu, The Escapist, and the Dump but the extension is primarily designed for YouTube – to configure video settings the way you like them and to change the layout of the website.

Some of the key video features for YouTube include:

• Disable auto-play
• Hide user comments
• Disable in-video ads
• Disable annotations
• Set desired resolution e.g. automatically choose highest/1080p HD res
• Set desired display size and sync to resolution
• Expand video to size of window
• Optional pre-buffering of videos
• Set Loop/replay
• Support for Flash and HTML YouTube platforms
• Change URL to https

There are also many ways to modify the page and change the look of the site e.g. disable any of the following individual components of the page except for the video – header, video title, description, user comments, suggested videos, footer, playlist, branding. These can all be hidden separately.

You can also matte or dim the page background to better highlight the video and reduce distractions.

Menu Options

The menu options for this extension are particularly clever – just move your cursor over a setting and the corresponding area of an example YouTube page is highlighted.

This is a great idea as it makes it easy to see where on the page each setting will take effect.

Page Action Popup Menu

By default, a YTO (YouTube Options) icon appears in the Omnibox whenever a compatible video is opened – click it to change settings ‘on the fly’. These take immediate effect so you can see the difference even as a video is playing.

Download

Download and more info from Chrome Web Store here.

Conclusion

YouTube Options for Google Chrome has numerous options but makes it very easy to see what effect each will have – you can even change options whilst a video is playing.

It’s one of the few Chrome extensions that beats any equivalent single Firefox add-on hands down – I don’t know of any obvious rival for Firefox that can match this level of granularity and ease of use.