If you liked Google’s “let it snow” Easter egg, YouTube has some special effects for you. YouTube’s player has a new button for snow, the progress bar includes a snowflake, while the search results page for queries like [snow] or [Christmas] use a simplified snow animation.

{ Thanks, Sterling, Venkat and Cookie Lee. }

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A week ago, I reported that YouTube tests a new interface based on Cosmic Panda. The most important feature is the redesigned homepage that helps you find new channels and explore the videos from your subscriptions. YouTube started to post additional information about the new interface and it’s now obvious that it will replace existing UI in the near future (the link only works after you’ve enabled the new interface).

“We’ve given YouTube a refresh. When you login, you’ll be greeted with recent activity from your subscriptions. You can also browse and add new Channels to your homepage. Connect with Google+ and Facebook to share your favorites with friends. There’s plenty to discover, so login and give it a spin.”

There’s also an article about the new interface for channels.

This new look and feel makes it easier for viewers to to find and watch content. It also makes it easier for Channel creators to organize and showcase exactly what they want. We incorporated your Feedback from the “Cosmic Panda” Channels and Watch experiment, and are excited to present:

* A more streamlined and consistent design
* An easier way to find and view videos
* New, more flexible layouts for featured content, and
* A way to keep your audience engaged even when you don’t have new uploads

It’s interesting to notice that the new homepage and the new channels are built around feed views and activity streaming to make YouTube even more social.

The new channels are less customizable: you can only choose an avatar, a background image, a background color and a template (creator, blogger, network, everything).

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YouTube’s HTML5 player has improved a lot lately and it’s almost ready to replace the Flash player. You can enable annotations and captions, the contextual menu lets you copy the embedding code and the video’s URL, YouTube now offers 480p and 1080p options for WebM videos and there’s native full-screen support if you use a Firefox nightly build or Chrome’s dev channel.

I’ve also noticed that sometimes embedded videos use the HTML5 player even if you’ve already installed Flash and you haven’t enabled the HTML5 trial.

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Google+ added a small YouTube icon that’s always displayed next to the scrollbar. When you mouse over the icon, you’ll see a search box that asks you “what would you like to play?”. Type your query and Google+ opens a pop-up window with 20 search results. It’s actually a playlist and videos start playing automatically.

You can +1 a video you like or share it with your circles. When you share a video, Google also adds a link to a playlist with related videos.

The nice thing is that you can minimize the pop-up window and still be able to pause a video or go to the next video directly from Google+. This is especially useful for music.

“It’s no secret that YouTube is filled with tons of great content (from inspiring speeches to music videos to honey badgers). We wanted to bring YouTube directly into Google+ — as well as make it easier to watch and share your favorites — so we’re launching a YouTube ‘slider’ in the stream,” mentions Google’s Vic Gundotra.

What about a Google Music player?

{ Thanks, Thomas, Benjamin and Herin. }

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YouTube has a new online video editor that lets you trim the video, rotate it, remove shaky camera motions, adjust the contrast, saturation and color temperature, apply simple effects like “sepia”, “cartoon”, “thermal” and add a free audio soundtrack from YouTube’s library.

While the editor is pretty basic, the main advantage is that you can replace the original video, but this only works if your video has less than 1,000 views and YouTube hasn’t received a copyright complaint from a third-party. There’s also a “save as” option that lets you save the edited version as a new video.

How to find the new editor? Make sure you’re logged in, go to “My videos & playlists” and click “Edit video” next to the video you want to edit. You can also open a video you’ve uploaded and click “Edit video”.

To make things more confusing, YouTube has another video editor that lets you mix your videos and Creative Commons videos from other YouTube users, add audio soundtracks from YouTube’s library and apply transitions.

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The YouTube feature I mentioned a few days ago is publicly available: YouTube automatically generates pages that list the most recent videos embedded in a blog.

“By crawling web feeds of sites that have embedded videos, we’ve built dedicated pages that highlight your embedded videos. This means that there is now a place on YouTube to find videos mentioned on your favorite blogs & sites,” explains YouTube’s blog.

You can find pages for blogs like Engadget, Boing Boing, Google OS and the nice thing is that the URL is easy to guess. Unfortunately, the pages don’t have feeds and you can’t follow them.

For now, you’ll find links to these pages next to some videos in a section called “as seen on”. Instead of linking to a popular page that embeds the video, YouTube now links to a page with the most recent YouTube videos from the site.

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Philippe Lagane spotted a new YouTube feature: a special page that lists the most recent videos embedded by a blog. The page includes short snippets from the blog posts and allows you to play all the videos and add them to a playlist.

A Google search for [site:youtube.com/social/blog] returns about 40 results, but it’s likely that all the blogs indexed by Google will be included. The new pages could become an alternative to channels for blogs that embed content from other publishers.

YouTube already has a section titled “popular around the Web” that includes the most viewed videos embedded on other websites and shows messages like “As seen on: engadget.com” next to the videos.

{ Thanks, Philippe. }

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YouTube’s drop down menu at the top of the page now includes a list of all your playlists and makes it easier to access your favorite videos, your liked videos and the videos added to the “Watch later” playlist.

“You will now see a different set up when you click on your username in the upper right hand corner of any page. In addition to showing the same links to access your Account, My Videos, etc. you will be able to click on thumbnails to automatically load your playlists, Liked, Favorites, and Watch Later lists. The songs in your playlists will be accessible in the strip across the bottom of your screen — so you can easily navigate to different videos in the playlist you are watching,” explained a Google employee.

Another way to access your playlists is to expand the small bar displayed at the bottom of the page, click “Options” and select “Load a different playlist”.

{ Thanks, Andrew. }

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YouTube has a new interface for related searches and advanced search options. Now you can select multiple filters from a category and combine related searches. For example, you can find long-form HD videos that are available in the WebM format.

If you click on one of the queries from the “Explore” section, you’ll replace the original query. A more interesting option is to mouse over a query and click the “plus” icon: this way, you’ll refine your original search.

YouTube adds both filters and refinements to the query and separates them by comma. A search for [slow motion, hd, webm, high speed camera] includes two filters that are treated separately: “hd” and “webm”.

You can also add the name of a channel (example: [slow motion, @tpsfilmstudio]) or the name of a category (example: [slow motion, sports]).

The new features were part of an experiment called YouTube Topics that tried to help users find videos. “We know that sometimes people come to YouTube looking for a specific video, but at other times, they have only a rough idea of the kind of videos they want.”

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YouTube’s HTML5 interface has a very cool feature: if you right-click on a video, you’ll no longer see the boring contextual menu displayed by the browser that added uninteresting features like downloading videos. Instead, you’ll get a much more useful menu that sends you to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video.

Some would say that this trick reminds them of the sites that annoyed users by disabling browser features like the contextual menu so that people can’t save an image or copy some text. But that’s not what happens here: YouTube’s terms of use forbid users from downloading videos and the new menu solves this issue by offering a better option. After all, why download a video when you can listen to Rick Astley’s fabulous song?

There are at least two uncivil browsers (Firefox and Opera) that treat videos just like images and allow users to right-click on a video and download it. Firefox even lets you disable custom contextual menus for all sites, while Opera provides more granular options. There’s even a developer that breached YouTube’s terms of use by creating a Greasemonkey script with a strange name: Youtube HTML5 Beta “Save Video As” Unrickroller. Apparently, he lost his sense of humor or he’s not a Rick Astley fan.

I’m not going to use any of these features and I’ll stick to Google Chrome, a browser that doesn’t offer a download option for videos. Whenever I want to download a YouTube video, I’ll ignore all those scripts and tricks and I’ll read YouTube’s terms of use, while listening to Rick Astley’s song. They’re a perfect match.

“… You know the rules and so do I …”

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