what the fuck, it doesn't give you controls for scrubbing through the video. I missed the beginning of the video someone linked to and my options were refresh the page or wait for it to loop. Why would anyone want it to work this way?
anytime you get shanghaied into watching a short, replace the shorts/ in the URL with watch?v= to force the regular video interface
no idea what possessed YouTube to even push them other than "we gotta corner TikTok's market somehow", but it's something at least
If you're using firefox, there's an addon that lets you modify URLs with regex, so you don't have to manually scrungle the url.
With that installed, in the addon's preferences, you add the following rule (don't add the backticks, that's just me trying to markdown format this properly):
- format:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/(.*) - destination:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\1
You don't even need an add-on! A technology that works as far back as IE will do! Mobile Compatible!
CoHost sadly sanitizes hrefs to remove bookmarklets, so I cannot link to it directly. But you can use a Bookmarklet to do the job!
The gist of it is:
-
Create a bookmark.
-
Name the bookmark (E.G. "Expand YouTube Short").
-
Paste the following into the emptied URL portion (make sure to copy this in full!).
javascript:void%20function()%7Bvar%20o=window.location.href;o=o.replace(/https:%5C/%5C/www%5C.youtube%5C.com%5C/shorts%5C/(%3F=.*)/g,%22https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv=%22),window.location.href=o%7D();
-
Save the bookmark.
-
When viewing any YouTube Short, click or tap the bookmark, and the script will replace the URL for you!
Tested in Safari and it works! :)
It basically works under the same principle as the firefox extension. It first gets the URL, applies a regex expression to replace the short url with the full watch page URL, then applies that URL, loading the new page.
Should work on mobile too!
This took considerably long to post because a Cohost bug was sanitizing bookmarklet input, even inside code blocks. It works, now!
