News - New YouTube is faster, slicker and better

[HEXUS]

YouTube gets a makeover with new look and format.

Read more.

[acidrainy]

Personally I think it's long overdue and fantastic.

Before, youtube was a series of orphan pages that I really only went to by following links direct to clips.

Now the interface is actual usable and far far easier just to "flick through".


Bravo Google.


PS, I like the fact the black bard of ugly doom is going from the other Google services too

[AlexKitch]

I like it.

But please, *please* *PLEASE*, YouTube, add a video rating bar to each video in the 'Suggested Videos' column you see on each video page. I've probably lost 20 seconds of my life every time I've followed a video link only to discover it has 97% thumbs down ratings, is dreadful, and I've had to hit 'Back', which probably adds up to around 6 hours of my life wasted.

[aidanjt]

Now we just need Google to make the HTML5 player not suck and dump flash altogether.

[Noxvayl]

I'm loving the new design. I hoped they'd sort YouTube out after seeing the good work done with Google Docs and Gmail.

ThumbsUp

[Noli]

But please, *please* *PLEASE*, YouTube, add a video rating bar to each video in the 'Suggested Videos' column you see on each video page. I've probably lost 20 seconds of my life every time I've followed a video link only to discover it has 97% thumbs down ratings, is dreadful, and I've had to hit 'Back', which probably adds up to around 6 hours of my life wasted.

Superb suggestions Mr Kitch! All that wasted time on faketrailers, slideshows and other non-videos... If Google really thinks (and they do) that their instant search is clever by saving 2-5 seconds from each of our searches (and therefore 100s of years of waiting when scaled globally), then the same logic applies to youtube.

As for increased speed - I'll have to see - I'm sick of seeing even 360p videos constantly pausing and buffering on my 20mbit connection (I get at least 8mbit actual on download test sites/usenet) - it's pathetic. Maybe if google could sort that out before changing their window dressing I'd be a lot happier...

[baius]

YouTube, add a video rating bar to each video in the 'Suggested Videos' column.

Hear, Hear.

...which probably adds up to around 6 hours of my life wasted.

[SARCASM]That is serious.[/SARCASM]

[MORE_SARCASM]Have you considered giving up YouTube?[/MORE_SARCASM]

[sweey]

Much better and long overdue.

The new look emphasies what a mess it used to be.

[Whiternoise]

I like it.

But please, *please* *PLEASE*, YouTube, add a video rating bar to each video in the 'Suggested Videos' column you see on each video page. I've probably lost 20 seconds of my life every time I've followed a video link only to discover it has 97% thumbs down ratings, is dreadful, and I've had to hit 'Back', which probably adds up to around 6 hours of my life wasted.

Could that be done with greasemonkey?

You'd just need an ajax call (or something similar) to pull down the linked video rating and then inject it below the thumbnail. Difficulty would be making it low overhead.

[Whiternoise]

Well, it only took 3 hours - haven't really programmed Javascript before and get my head around asynchronous code/callbacks (guh.):

You'll need Greasemonkey of course. It puts a percentage underneath each video link which is the proportion of people that "liked" the video. There is already a userscript that does this, using the YouTube API. I think it's probably a bit faster (but it still has to return API data for each video), but it requires potentially a lot of AJAX calls once a second - mine requires 20 total.

https://www.userscripts.org/scripts/show/117864

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Visible Youtube Ratings
// @namespace      Youtube
// @include        http://*youtube.com*
// @include        https://*youtube.com*
// @description Adds percentage ratings to videos in the side bar
// ==/UserScript==
//  Written by Josh Veitch-Michaelis, 2011 - Modify and Attribute!

        el = document.body.getElementsByClassName('video-list-item-link');
        
        for (var i=0; i < el.length; i++){
            makeRatingCallback(el[i]);
        }
        
        function makeRatingCallback(element){
            getRating(element);
        }
        
        function getRating(element){
            var link = element.href;
            
            if (window == top) {
                GM_xmlhttpRequest({
                    method: 'GET',
                    url: link,
                    headers: {
                        'User-agent': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible) Greasemonkey',
                        'Accept': 'application/atom+xml,application/xml,text/xml',
                    },
                    onload: function(responseDetails) {
                        GM_log("Callback Sent");
                        showRating(responseDetails, element);
                    }
                });
            }
            return;
        }
        
        function showRating(responseDetails, element){
            /* Dirty regex, for some reason running the DOM parser on YouTube gives a "not well formed" error */
            var ratingpc = new String(responseDetails.responseText.match(/class=\"watch-sparkbar-likes\" style=\"width:\s+[0-9]+.?[0-9]{1,2}?/));
            var ratingpcshort = new String(ratingpc.match(/[0-9]+.?[0-9]{1,2}?/));
            
            var link = element.href;
            
            var ratingspan = document.createElement('span');
            element.appendChild(ratingspan);
            if(ratingpcshort != 'null'){
                ratingspan.innerHTML = ratingpcshort+"% Liked";
            }else{
                ratingspan.innerHTML = "Unrated";
            }    
            
            return;
        }

Issues:
Doesn't have fancy CSS yet (though that's trivial)
Doesn't work for videos when you click "show more"
Only works for side-panel videos at the moment, but it shouldn't be too hard to adapt it to work with normal searches.
If the video can't be rated then you're stuck either way.

Screenie (note percentages right hand side):


Enjoy