These keyboard shortcuts should give you some relief to the frustrations of video playback on YouTube and in some ways might make YouTube viewing more enjoyable. (only available in Blink-based and Webkit-based browsers) Compatibility with Mac and Windows: Compatible with Windows 10, Win 8. (repeat to explore all the available options) The GK64xs supports two space bar configurations, one with a normal-sized single. If you’re watching a video but haven’t interacted with the player itself yet, the following keyboard shortcuts are available to you: ShortcutĬhanges the visual elements of the Closed Captioning text.

Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t make it easy to discover the various shortcuts, or even indicate which mode you’re in.

(That’s why spacebar jumps down the page instead of pausing the video). Full Screen mode and Player Focused mode can utilize YouTube’s full range of shortcuts. Page Focused mode is the most limited mode for shortcuts, as to not interfere with normal browser controls. As you’d expect, Full Screen mode (3) is activated when you full screen the video. Player Focused mode (2) becomes enabled when you click one of the controls on the player. Here’s where things get messy: YouTube uses different shortcuts depending on how you’ve interacted with the page. YouTube essentially has three “modes”: Page Focused mode (1) is when you are watching a video on YouTube but you have not directly interacted with the video player. YouTube’s Different Modes: Page Focused, Player Focused, and Full Screen Thankfully, you should never have to use spacebar to control YouTube: it has its own special keyboard shortcuts built-in. Why do browsers use the spacebar as a standard shortcut for page scrolling rather than just using the arrow keys? Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s a standard shortcut in nearly all browsers. If the player isn’t in focus, it’ll use your browser’s default spacebar behavior: scrolling down the page.

There’s one catch, though: pressing spacebar only pauses when the player is focused or in Full Screen. Like other media players, YouTube also allows you to press the spacebar for play/pause, because that’s what everyone else does. During that time, other media players were using Ctrl+P as the method to control this function but eventually practically all media players adopted the spacebar convention. It’s hard to tell where this started, but in my research, I found references to both RealPlayer and QuickTime as far back as 2001. Most, if not all, media players available today, including video streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, utilize the spacebar as the shortcut for playing and pausing media. You’ve essentially been programmed to use the spacebar through a gradual and likely accidental form of Behavioral Engineering. Why Does Pressing the Spacebar Jump Down the Page?

Windows 10 spacebar not working