According to the Youtube blog, Youtube Shorts have been introduced in September 2020.
Shorts are portret (vertical) videos whose length is capped at a minute.
If you have ever watched one, you might have noticed that Shorts also use a different player that loops the video, and (more problematically), starts playing another video as soon as the cursor is focused on it, which makes navigating frustrating, and disables volume and seek controls, too.
The Solution
Luckily, we have a way to play shorts in the regular Youtube player.
- • The Manual Way.
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No matter what browser you use, the manual way to use the regular player is to go to the address bar, and change the “/shorts/” part of the URL to “/watch/”, so that a link like
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EyxTWC4r_XU
Looks likehttps://www.youtube.com/watch/EyxTWC4r_XU
. - • The Automatic Way.
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This, however, is not ideal since you would have to do this for every single video.
My solution: A browser extension that does this automatically.
One such addon is Redirector by Einar Egilsson.
Once you have it installed, you may need to restart your browser.
After that, find the extension.
- Firefox
- Press control+e to set focus to the navigation toolbar, tab until you hear save to pocket, right arrow until you get to extensions, press space, and once you have found Redirector in the list with up/down arrows, press enter.
- Chrome
- While inside webpage contents, press alt, then left arrow a few times until you get to “Extensions” menu, then tab until you get to “Redirector”, and press space.
Once you're in the Redirector options, find the “Edit Redirects” button, and press it.
In the new page, you should see a clickable text that says “Create new redirect”, press it.
Now you will get a form to fill out.
- • Description
- Replace /shorts/ with /watch/ on youtube.
- • Example URL
- https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EyxTWC4r_XU
- • Pattern
- ^(https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?youtube\.com\/)shorts\/([^"&?\/\s]{11})$
- • Redirect to
- $1watch/$2
- • Pattern type
- Regular Expression
If everything checks out, the save button will be enabled, and pressing it means that the shorts are now officially redirected to the regular player.
You may test the redirection by opening a Youtube Short like this one of a cat who says «OK” (you're welcome 😸).
If an error occurs, the save button will be unavailable, and you will see an error. Please follow the instructions carefully, and paste the text in the list above exactly as it is written.