Opt in for the new YouTube player

Tired of YouTube’s plain-old video player? Then try out the new beta player that is ready for playtesting. The new player has a transparent interface, which floats above the video being played. Other improvements include scalability across different screen-sizes, making sure those watching on a 4K display won’t have to deal with a tiny user interface. If better 4K playback wasn’t enough, then perhaps the option to view 4K content at 60 frames-per-second will be enough to get excited about (assuming your device is packing enough power). Additionally, websites which embed YouTube videos, will now benefit from added scalability.

In order to use the new player, simply head on over to YouTube’s TestTube page and select the option towards the bottom to join. Its a whole lot easier than it once was, which forced eager techies to fiddle around with extensions to get it to work. If you feel that the new webplayer isn’t to your liking, you can switch back to the previous version as easily as you entered it, by returning to TestTube page and clicking “restore original player.”

The new video player arrives shortly after the site’s revised focus on streaming. YouTube recently added a new option for 60 frames-per-second streams, keeping competitive with Twitch, the game-streaming site, which has had the streaming option for a long time. The changes to YouTube are among the small iterative steps towards Google enhancing their portfolio of services. A new cloud-based photo storage service, and last year’s Inbox app, are among the company’s latest efforts to streamline the way we interact with the content which matters to us.