You probably already know some key YouTube keyboard shortcuts. It’s not a hack to say “K” pauses and plays videos, or that “F” makes a video full-screen. But there are plenty of useful keyboard shortcuts you aren’t using, mainly because YouTube doesn’t advertise them.

However, discovering these shortcuts is easy, once you know the hidden shortcut that reveals them all. Holding Shift + / (or ?) will bring up a menu with all of YouTube’s keyboard shortcuts. Did you know you can use “,” and “.” to skip back and forward one frame at a time when a video is paused? Shift + , and Shift + . (or < and >), on the other hand, decrease and increase playback speed.

Check out the menu and commit all the shortcuts to memory (at least the ones you’d find useful). For more information about these hidden keyboard shortcut menus, read our guide here.

Sometimes, you share a YouTube video because the whole thing is great. Often though, you’re interested in showing off a specific moment in the video. Don’t bother telling your friends to start it from “4:50" or “7:29,” however. Instead, you can include a timestamp in the URL so the video automatically plays where you want it to.

To do so, don’t copy the URL from your browser. You’ll want to start by queuing up the video to the timestamp in question, then click “Share.” From here, click the box next to “Start at” to add the timestamp to your URL, then click “COPY” to copy the new URL. Send that link, and it will open to the point in the video you want to share.

Is it just me, or does it drive anyone else crazy when videos automatically play when you hover your cursor over them? It does nothing for me, so I disabled it. On desktop, click your profile, then choose Settings. Go to Playback and performance, then disable “Inline playback” next to Browsing.

If your beef is with autoplaying thumbnails on Android or your TV, stay tuned.

Autoplay is great when you’re listening to music on YouTube, but that’s about it. By default, YouTube will automatically play a recommended video once you’re done with what you’re watching, which gets frustrating when you only wanted to check out that particular video.

Adding to the annoyance, Autoplay needs to be disabled individually for each device or app. You’ll find the Autoplay button (a toggle with the Play button in it) in the video player itself. Start playing a video on the website or the mobile app, and tap the Autoplay button to disable the feature.

On the TV, the steps are different. Open the YouTube app on your TV, go to Settings > Autoplay and choose the “Off” option.

YouTube learned an annoying trick from Netflix: Autoplaying thumbnail previews with sound. It’s arguably the most irritating in the YouTube TV apps, but it’s there in the mobile apps, too.

To disable it on the mobile app, go to Settings > General > Playback in Feeds, and choose “Off.” To disable the feature on the TV app, go to Settings > Previews with Sound > Off.

YouTube Premium is a great investment. You get access to offline downloads, and you’ll never see an ad again. But it also comes with background playback enabled by default, quite annoying when all you want YouTube to do is to stop playback when you exit the app. You can disable this from Settings > Background & Downloads > Background Play > Off.

YouTube won’t remember your dark mode preferences across devices, so you’ll need to make your choices on each platform you’re watching. Dark mode tends to look the best when watching videos, but it’s also required for Ambient mode, a new aesthetic feature YouTube recently rolled out.

On your iPhone, go to Settings > General and enable “Dark Theme” to switch to dark mode permanently. On Android, go to Settings > General > Appearance and either use the “Use Device Theme” or the “Dark Theme” option.

On the website, click your profile icon, and go to the “Appearance” section. From here, you can choose the “Use Device Theme” or the “Dark Theme” option based on your needs.

When you’re watching a lecture on YouTube, you might want to copy the subtitles or the transcript directly to your notes. Instead of transcribing by hand, use this hidden feature to copy the entire video transcript in just a second.

Open the YouTube video in your browser, click the three-dotted Menu button below the video, and choose the “Open Transcript” option. Here, you can copy whatever text you want. Check out our detailed guide for more steps, where we highlight a third-party option that lets you download the entire transcript with one click.

You use YouTube to search for all sorts of things. No judgment here. And sometimes, you might not want all your videos to show up in your watch history (especially if you use your account on your TV).

There’s a way to clear or pause your watch history. Open the YouTube website, go to the “Library” section, and choose the “History” tab from the top. Here, click the “Clear All Watch History” or “Pause Watch History” based on your needs.

You might be used to double-tapping on the right-hand side of the screen to quickly fast-forward a video. This happens in increments of 10 seconds, which can be quite tedious when you’re trying to get through a long video.

Go to Settings > General > Skip Forward and Back. Here, you can choose a duration of up to 60 seconds, or as little as five seconds, if you prefer to skip in shorter increments.

With the past couple of updates, YouTube has tried really hard to obscure the resolution control as much as possible. By default, YouTube will try to optimize data speed rather than video quality, which means you end up seeing 480p or 720p videos, even when you’re on a fast, stable network connection. Here’s the fix.

In the YouTube app, go to Settings > Video Quality Preferences. Here, for both “On Mobile Networks” and “On Wi-Fi,” switch to the “Higher Picture Quality” option.

This switch should save you from blurry videos. You can choose the video resolution for a video, as well. When the video is playing, tap the three-dotted Menu button, and choose the “Quality” option. Go to the “Advanced” menu, and you’ll see the familiar video resolution menu.

This post was originally published Dec. 7, 2021. It was updated Oct. 31, 2022, to update previous entries and add new solutions YouTubers would find useful today.