Youtube easter eggs "snow", "playing snake", "wadsworth constant"

Youtube being a google product also has its own kind of easter eggs which can are similar to that of google search based easter eggs and just as many youtube tricks were shared in the blog before now 3 different youtube easter eggs are explained in brief here.

1) Playing Snake in Youtube : Snake game can be played while watching videos on youtube asusually. While watching a video hold the left key and then press the up key while still holding the left key which makes the snake game to be launched.The process of the game loading happens in 2 steps basically, holding the left arrow key makes the video to rewind and load momentarily and pressing the up arrow key while the video is loading makes the player to launch the snake game.



The trick basically works for youtube's new player only and for those videos only without annotations and ads in the video, also the trick is limited to videos played on youtube only and doesn't work on embedded videos. Here is a example video of how the thing works basically.




2) Snowfall effects in youtube : The youtube player has a new button of a snowflake clicking which while playing a video provides a snowfall effect in the video being watched similar to that of google search's let it snow. The search queries for things like snow and christmas gets a simplified snow animation on the search query.




search for snow



search for christmas




3) Wadsworth Skip : In Youtube adding &wadsworth=1 to the URL will apply Wadsworth's constant (skip 30%). Basically Wadsworth Constant is a fundamental idea that the true meaning of a video, conversation, or comment approaches importance after approximately 30% of it has been skipped over. so applying wadsworth constant to youtube videos make the video to skip approx 30% of the video.

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Youtube Video tricks

Youtube is a Google owned vast Video sharing site which has plenty of high quality and informative videos in it.

Here are some of the tricks which can be used on youtube videos of that particular video url for the desired kind of the result as mentioned with the trick.

1) View high quality videos : Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2) Embed Higher Quality Videos : While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the embed url.

3) Cut the chase and link to the interesting part : Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4) Hide the search box : The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5) Embed only a part of Video : Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6) Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering : Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode>

7) Download Video : Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching. Firefox Addons like downloadvideohelper, grabitall, youtubevideodownloader etc.. also can be used to download the video from the youtube.

8) Autoplay a Video : If you want your embedded video to start playing automatically, once again you can do so by simply modifying the url. In this case you need to append the string “&autoplay=1” to the url and remove everything before and after the embed tag.


9) Loop a Video : If you wish to loop a video add the string “ &loop=1” to the end of the url.


10) Disable related videos in YouTube’s embedded Player : Many webmasters may want to disable related videos in YouTube’s embedded player since it encourages the reader to navigate away from the current website. Once again the solution is as simple as appending the string “rel=0” to the video URL.

Instead of manually modifying the embed code you can let a new service called VTubeTools do it. VTubeTools.com allows you to customize your YouTube player with a few clicks. You can resize the player, autostart the video, loop the video and enable high quality version. It also allows you to set custom background (you can just change the colours or even use your own background picture).

11) Embed a Part of a YouTube Video : Youtube supports a parameter called “start” that allows start playing an embedded video after a specified number of seconds. For example if the interesting part of the video begins only after 20 seconds you need to use the code &start=20.

Example Code:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/KyuPDRflFDU&hl=en&fs=1&start=20“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk...tart=20” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Alternatively you can use the service Splicd to extract only a certain portion of a Youtube video.

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