YouTube Video Player with Storyboards

The next version of YouTube video player will have one very useful feature – you can hover your mouse to any point in the video, without actually moving the playhead, and the YouTube player will show you an image thumbnail of the video frame at the position. Thus you can easily get a visual gist of the whole video while the clip is still buffering.

I recorded a screencast video and that should give you a better idea of this new feature.

YouTube Storyboards

YouTube, as you know, generates three thumbnail images to represent a video and these images are captured using the frames at around 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 points in the video. For instance, if a YouTube video clip is 60 seconds long, the image thumbnails would be generated around frames at the 15s, 30s and 45s mark respectively.

For the new video player, YouTube generates one big Storyboard of 100 thumbnails per video and these thumbnail images are arranged in the Storyboard like a 10x10 grid. As you move your mouse to different points in the video player, it quickly grabs the corresponding thumbnail for that position from the storyboard.

This should save time as you can quickly jump to the most interesting portions of a video based on the scenes shown in the thumbnails. Alternatively, you can skip the video completely if the description doesn’t match the inner thumbnails.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

0

Awards & Titles

Digital Inspiration has won several awards since it's launch in 2004.

Google Developer Expert

Google Developer Expert

Google awarded us the Google Developer Expert award recogizing our work in Google Workspace.

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

Our Gmail tool won the Lifehack of the Year award at ProductHunt Golden Kitty Awards in 2017.

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft awarded us the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title for 5 years in a row.

Google Cloud Champion

Google Cloud Champion

Google awarded us the Champion Innovator title recognizing our technical skill and expertise.

Email Newsletter

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay up to date.

We will never send any spam emails. Promise.