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YouTube tweaks its embedded video player

YouTube's embedded media player gets several small but important tweaks. It's still got its simple silver and black interface though.

Josh Lowensohn Former Senior Writer
Josh Lowensohn joined CNET in 2006 and now covers Apple. Before that, Josh wrote about everything from new Web start-ups, to remote-controlled robots that watch your house. Prior to joining CNET, Josh covered breaking video game news, as well as reviewing game software. His current console favorite is the Xbox 360.
Josh Lowensohn

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past three years you've watched a YouTube video off of YouTube.com. So many viewers watch videos this way (YouTube says it's 44 percent of viewership), the company has overhauled its player, making several of the site's latest features available off of YouTube's site.

The biggest change is the inclusion of annotations and closed captions, meaning if you're watching a video that has them added you'll see them as the video plays. This includes the latest translation feature too, so if you're watching a foreign video with foreign subtitles you can translate it in real-time.

Additionally, YouTube now includes a search bar on the top of the player, which appears with related videos as soon as you finish watching. The results show up within the player, so if you've got an embedded video on your blog it's not going to jettison your users somewhere else.

Still missing from the embedded player is a way to tweak between low and high quality, view and leave comments, and get the quick links to share videos on social networks--all things you can do on YouTube's site.

You can see a quick overview of the new tweaks in the video below: