Watch Videos In The Firefox Sidebar With YouPlayer

Who doesn’t love watching videos online ? Whether it’s a video of a recent live concert, your favorite song or a tutorial on something, you name it and you’ll find the video on the popular video sites. This is the reason why YouTube is one of the top 3 websites on the internet. It just seems to have all your favorite videos and hence you love spending time on it.

YouPlayer is an innovative Firefox extension which further adds to the joy of watching those videos by letting you play them in your Firefox sidebar. Afterwards you don’t need to go to the site again and again - you can just play a video in the sidebar and also carry on some other work, like checking emails. It lets you create a playlist of videos and the playing order can be customized.

After installing YouPlayer you’ll notice a small ‘ YP ‘ symbol in the Firefox status bar. Clicking on it lets you open or close the YouPlayer sidebar. This an awesome extension which comes with a host of features.

1. Support For Many Sites

Apart from supporting Youtube, it also supports Google Video, Daily Motion, Metacafe and MySpace. There is a small search option in the lower right hand corner of the sidebar and you can easily change to one of these sites and play videos on them.

So those of you who love watching videos on other sites apart from YouTube can utilize this extension too.

2. Drag And Drop Links

You can easily drag and drop links from the website onto the sidebar playlist. Once you hit the play button or double click the link, it starts playing. This drag and drop works vice versa as well, which means that you can drag a link from the playlist window to the browser address bar or right click to open it in a new tab.

3. Play Other FLV files on the Hard Drive too

YouPlayer goes one step further and allows you to drag and drop FLV files from your hard drive and play them in the sidebar playlist window. You’ll need to check the ‘Use new player (experimental)’ option from the player options when you want to play an offline flv video. However, it doesn’t support playing of other files like .mp3 or .avi .

4. Customize the Playing Order

Yes, you can easily customize the playing order in the YouPlayer playlist. Whether you want to play the videos in succession - one after the other - or you want them to be played in a random order, you can easily achieve this in one click.

5. One-click Download of the Videos

Here comes the icing on the cake. When you right click on an item in the playlist, you find these options - Add URL, Edit item, Open new item… and Download ! Yes this is another quick way in addition to the 4 quick ways to download Youtube videos which I discussed before. In fact this also lets you easily download a MySpace or Metacafe video easily. Cool!

I’m already enjoying this add on. I haven’t had any errors or troubles and it works just perfect. Like Winamp, it also allows you to choose from a few skins. So overall, this is a great add-on to play multiple online videos and also multi-task at the same time. Give it a shot !

(By) Abhijeet Mukherjee is addicted to the internet and loves blogging and freelance writing. He blogs about tech tweaks, blogging tips, productivity hacks at Jeet Blog.