How to loop videos on YouTube
YouTube isn’t a music service the way Spotify and Pandora are. Most if not all music videos from every single artist ever, are released on YouTube and songs tend to get caught in your head. Plenty of people end up listening to something on loop, for hours. A few years ago, if you wanted to loop videos on YouTube, you had to use an add-on or extension on the desktop, and for mobile apps a different app altogether.
Loop videos on YouTube
Looping videos on YouTube is now easy because the options are built-in on both the desktop website and the mobile apps. The YouTube website has had it for quite some time, but the mobile apps have only recently added it.
1. Loop videos on YouTube – Browser
To loop a video on the YouTube desktop website,
- Open your browser and visit YouTube.
- Play the video you want to loop.
- Right-click on the player once.
- Right-click a second time.
- Select Loop from the menu.
- The video will play on loop until you stop it.
- To stop looping the video, you can refresh the page or unselect the loop option from the same context menu.
Note: Sometimes the correct right-click context menu doesn’t show up i.e. you won’t get the menu with the loop option. Try right-clicking again and it should be there.
2. Loop videos on YouTube – iOS/Android
To loop videos on YouTube on the iOS or the Android app;
- Open the YouTube app.
- Select a video to play.
- Tap the more options button at the top right of the video player (it appears if the video controls are visible).
- Select the Loop option from the menu.
- The video will now play on loop.
- To turn it off, unselect the Loop option from the same menu.
Conclusion
When you loop videos on YouTube, they reload each time the video plays. You are not saving any bandwidth when you loop it. In fact, when you loop a video on your phone, and you’re on a data plan, you will be consuming considerably bandwidth. It might be better to spring for a Spotify or Pandora subscription; you only expend bandwidth on an audio stream and not the video stream. That said, YouTube is also home to harder-to-find, more obscure, niche videos that you won’t find elsewhere. It may cost more bandwidth to watch a video on loop but if the video can only be found on YouTube, then there isn’t exactly an alternative.
