Previews on YouTube’s seek bar are getting a ‘big’ upgrade
While easily the biggest benefit of YouTube Premium is that you get rid of those obnoxious ads, it also affords you a bundled subscription to YouTube Music and access to a bunch of features like higher picture quality and media controls. Premium users enjoy the option to try out new experimental features that aren’t yet available to everyone else. YouTube is currently testing one such feature that makes it easier to follow along with preview thumbnails on the seek bar and jump to the right spot.
The thumbnail that appears right above the seek bar lets you see a preview of where you're looking to jump to. But if the video has some minute details or text — as can often be the case with how-to videos — you may not find the small preview box quite so helpful. To address that, this new YouTube trial feature displays bigger previews when you scrub the seek bar back and forth.
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You can head to YouTube’s dedicated experimental features page to enable bigger previews on your Premium account. After this, you will start seeing slightly larger previews on YouTube videos when you hover the mouse pointer on the seek bar. In the comparison screenshots above, you can see that the new thumbnail size makes things a tad bigger and easier to gauge what’s going on in that section of the video.
Besides larger previews, YouTube recently added another experimental shortcut to speed up video. You can long-press the right half of the video player to increase the playback speed to 2x — this should come in handy when you want to speed up the video only momentarily, and watch the rest at a normal pace. You can enable it from the same feature list, but bear in mind that you can only test one of these features at a time.
Both these trial features are available until August 13, and can only be used on YouTube for the web, as there’s no support for the Android app currently. You can give them a try right away if you have YouTube Premium.
Source: Android Police
