YouTube is rolling out a new Chapters feature across mobile and web that should make searching through a video for specific content a lot less annoying.

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One of the frustrating things about YouTube is having to scrub through long videos and stopping and starting playback to find the content that interests you. Until now, users had to rely on considerate YouTubers adding a list of timestamps in their video descriptions to help viewers in their search.

But YouTube's Chapters feature aims to do away with the hassle by letting content creators embed timestamps right into the video progress bar. Now when you fast forward using the bar, a topic description appears directly below the thumbnail image, so you can quickly skip to the bit that interests you.


To add the identifying labels, creators just need to type the relevant timestamps in a video's description when they're uploading. For the feature to work, videos must have at least three chapters of 10 seconds or longer, and the first chapter has to start at 0:00.

YouTube has been experimenting with the feature for a while, so some users may have seen it already, but it's currently being rolled out globally on the platform for the first time.

Tag: YouTube

Top Rated Comments

lunarworks Avatar
50 months ago
YouTube finally catching-up to adult-oriented streaming services.
Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Unggoy Murderer Avatar
50 months ago
Great feature, but it would be great if they could fix the player experience on Apple TV - it's literally the worst thing I've used on the platform.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
chris4565 Avatar
50 months ago
That’s actually a nice new feature.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
willyx Avatar
50 months ago
Releasing this feature without a way to precisely scrub to the beginning of each chapter, without manually dragging the progress indicator, is a total fail.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
chris4565 Avatar
50 months ago

Great feature, but it would be great if they could fix the player experience on Apple TV - it's literally the worst thing I've used on the platform.
That's true. Navigating while playback e. g. to adjust subtitles is just not fun at all especially because so much of the image gets covered by the UI. The worst thing for me is the image quality. No matter the resolution it's just utter garbage, especially in dark scenes. I don't know if that's somehow bugged for me or normal.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
whsbuss Avatar
50 months ago

How about “Show associated playlists”
How about YouTube not removing content they don't agree with.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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