For when the other 90% of the video isn’t worth seeing again
YouTube is constantly adding features to improve the viewing experience — things like chapters, added back in May 2020. That one allowed a video to be broken up into distinct sections (or—wait for it—chapters) so that viewers could jump between portions of videos quickly and efficiently. But what if there’s one chapter of “Human Stunts Gone Wrong” that’s so funny you’ve just got to watch it over and over again? YouTube looks like it’s working on something that may help make that easier: video chapter looping.
The presence of a couple new text strings discovered in an XDA APK teardown of YouTube build 17.01.36 suggests that a “chapter repeat” toggle is in the works. While we can’t say exactly how this may be implemented in its final form, the option would presumably be available when viewing a video, letting you select a chapter (or chapters) to play repeatedly.
Chapters were already pretty great, and besides being able to jump directly to them in the player itself, you can share links to specific chapters, find search results can point to specific chapters, and in many cases YouTube can even automatically split videos up into them, saving time for creators. Of course, we’ve been able to play entire YouTube videos on a loop for a while now, but this new functionality would let you restrict the loop to specific chapters. Maybe you’ll want to loop a spooky scene from a movie that’s perfect for your next Halloween party, or repeat a specific chapter of a tutorial so your hands remain free to carry out the instructions.
As useful as this all sounds, not a hint of this is live right now, and all we have is the evidence suggesting it’s on its way. Consequently, it’s always possible that the developers could decide not to release it at all, or only make it available it on specific platforms.
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