20

What keyboard shortcut will open up full screen mode while playing YouTube videos?

Viewing on a Windows 7 machine.

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migrated from superuser.com Mar 13 '11 at 19:21

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20

If the YouTube video is the active part of the screen, F seems to work for me.

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  • +1 Yes, this works for me. However, I would stress active part of screen as it often isn't. It doesn't appear to receive focus by tabbing, so it might only be active if you have literally just clicked on it (Play or Pause). – MrWhite Aug 10 '12 at 11:08
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    I can't up-vote StlrFan's answer but the F key is the only shortcut that I know of. Interacting with the flash player is really terrible. Once it's focused I don't think you can get focus back to your browser without clicking outside flash and the opposite is also true, you can't grab flash focus unless you click it... I sure am glad it's dying... – sinekonata Feb 26 '13 at 22:50
  • Works for me, if I am focussed on the page, but not the video. Still thank you! – Florian Reisinger Jun 20 '18 at 20:21
7

While not a simple shortcut, there are several ways to achieve fullscreen play without a mouse:

  1. Visit https://youtube.com/html5 and opt-in to the experiment.
    After that most (but not all) youtube videos will use the native <video> tag instead of Flash, with a slightly different UI. The fullscreen control is reachable in this UI by pressing (quite a lot) Tab/Shift+Tab.

  2. Edit the URL (Alt+D) from https://youtube.com/watch?v=t9HMeYs2Yas form to http://youtube.com/v/t9HMeYs2Yas form. This will give you the player filling the whole browser window; you can now press F11 to really go full screen (being browser fullscreen, it behaves better than Flash fullscreen, especially with multiple monitors).

    A major drawback is that you're trapped into that one video — no access to comments, related videos, search etc.

  3. Edit the URL to https://www.youtube.com/tv#/watch?v=t9HMeYs2Yas form (if you're signed in you can just visit https://youtube.com/tv, navigate Up to My Watch History and press Enter to open your last video).
    This is by far the most keyboard-friendly way to consume youtube.

    • The player fills the window (F11 to really go full screen).
    • Press Up to access the player controls — pause (Space), seek (J/L), captions etc.
    • Press Down for navigation menu — doesn't interrupt the fullscreen video!
    • Press Esc to close controls/menu and get the clean player back.

    Drawbacks:

    • I didn't find any way to read comments (some would call this a blessing ;-).
    • You can't manually control the video quality. It's always "auto".
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3

Unfortunately, there is no built-in keyboard shortcut for going full screen on Youtube.
This is the current list of shortcuts.

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1

Press F11 it will display the video in full screen and when you press Esc it will change it back to normal size.

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0

There seems to be some indication that pressing F should switch to full-screen mode, but http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/comprehensive-guide-youtube-player-keyboard-shortcuts/ states that it doesn't work for everyone. Didn't work for me, anyway.

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  • 1
    The "F" key didn't work for me as well – user12341 Jul 21 '11 at 6:38
  • I think the F key is for embedded videos. – Alex Jul 21 '11 at 9:40
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You can check out these links and create your full screen YouTube launcher.

http://www.gwenael.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=193

https://superuser.com/questions/430862/windows-launch-google-chrome-in-fullscreen-mode

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    please include more information, summarize what needs to be done. have a look at this: Policy about link as answer – user53056 Mar 20 '13 at 7:43
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It’s quite simple, just press Shift+F.

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