YouTube on mobile appears to be testing full video playback with some video controls from your homepage, which expands upon the basic autoplay feature that is already available.
Some YouTube users are reporting the change, which adds two new buttons and a scrollable playback progress bar to any and all autoplay videos. This expands upon the captions and playback indicator that have been there for a little while already now.
Instead of having to expand a video to have it play with sound and enhanced controls, this move lets you quickly toggle audio, and the regular progress bar even allows you to scroll to specific points within a said content (h/t XDA). The audio and caption toggles are persistent, allowing you to activate/deactivate as you see fit.
We don’t know if scrolling beyond a video you spotted on your YouTube homepage, having it initiate full video playback and then scrolling back to it, will retain any viewing progress you have made. However, the current autoplay feature ordinarily restarts any video on your YouTube homepage. We’d wager this will be retained here, but the progress bar can be scrubbed to a specific point in a video far more easily.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to replicate this on any of our own test devices, but you can see just what it will look like in the screenshots below:
In all likelihood, this could very well be an A/B test and full video playback for content on your YouTube homepage might not be available to you at any point. We’re also not sure just how useful this will be unless it helps surface new content and creators. However, if you have seen it on your device, be sure to let us know down in the comments section below.
More on YouTube:
- Google’s new ‘Ads Creative Studio’ combines tools from YouTube, Display & Video 360, more
- YouTube for iPhone and iPad rolling out Picture-in-Picture (PiP) for Premium users worldwide
- YouTube Music for Android, iOS now lets you play songs directly from search [Updated]
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