YouTube Player

Throughout the years, YouTube has grown in content, improved in video quality and seemingly more and more people choose it as a daily entertainment source.
For this reason, software developers are constantly finding new ways of bringing you clips from YouTube under different forms. YouTube Player is one of those solutions.
It’s a lightweight tool that displays a comprehensive interface and enables you to watch YouTube videos from your desktop, without the need of opening the Internet browser. It rests on top of other applications meaning that you can work on your computer and at the same time enjoy a TED talk or watch the highlights from last nights rugby game.
YouTube Player directly connects to the website’s data servers and allows you to search for content as you would normally do from the browser. You can type in the name of the clip you are looking for and the application displays a list that contains that video along with others that are related.
The player doesn’t just render the clip for you, it offers you the same controls that are available in Flash Player. You get to pause the video at any time, use the seek bar, adjust the volume and even switch to HD mode if it is available.
When searching for a clip on YouTube, a lot the times you identify the clip by its thumbnail. For this reason, besides the list, YouTube Player also displays the clips as a 3D flip book which shows you the title of the videos along with their thumbnails.
All in all, YouTube Player seems to have it figured out when it comes to practicality and ease of access but there is though a big downside. It’s only been built to work on Windows 7 Beta and Vista SP1 operating systems that are quite rarely used today and will one day become extinct, along with the application.