Play YouTube on a floating window for follow along Photoshop, coding or other tutorials

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Having a floating window while you are learning to code, watching Photoshop tutorials or any other application makes it a lot easier to follow along. Also If you like multitasking while you are doing your repetitive task on your task, it’s nice to have something to make it more pleasant. Some people like playing music, some people like natural sounds or mix of both, I however like to view youtube videos. They are mostly funny videos that don’t need much of an attention, but still makes the work little more enjoyable.

If you are learning something off YouTube tutorials for coding, Photoshop, Video editing or just MSPaint. You can now watch and perform the tasks at the same time rather than switching to Youtube on your browser back and forth.

Floating Youtube Player SMPlayer

SMPlayer is an video media player similar to VLC. But for me it’s specialty lies in being able to stream YouTube and also it’s ability to stay afloat over other windows. The system is pretty simple and allows you to view the ginormous amount of content from YouTube.  And it is open-source and free.

SMPlayer has a lot more features than YouTube streaming and being “on the top”. The player window is skinable and you can even hide the controls for the immersive viewing. SMPlayer also has a YouTube browser called SMTube which allows you to search and browse the YouTube site. However, this is an optional module and you do not need it to be able to stream YouTube videos. Another feature is you can add youtube videos to a playlist. So you could just look up your subscription, copy the links, add the links to the playlist and enjoy the videos. And there are key shortcuts configurable to your preference.

Some of the tricks that I have been using are replacing “Ctrl+V” key binding to “add links” feature. This enables you to quickly add youtube links as copy/paste reflex is engraved in most computer users. SMPlayer automatically adds the link on your clipboard to the textbox and you are ready to add and play it. Another shortcut I use is “Ctrl+C” which hides the interface menu and buttons on the player. This allows you to only see the video without the distractions. And “Ctrl+L” shows the current playlist.

There are however some bug. Sometimes configuring a shortcut doesn’t work. I tried to make “Ctrl+Shift+V” to “add urls to playlist” but it didn’t trigger. And I don’t think I have any other application using the shortcut. If you do try SMPlayer, and it works for you let me know. I’ll try to see what might be causing it to fail.

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