Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- YouTube on Android TV is adding a new Display option for music videos.
- Selecting this allows you to toggle between the video, an album-art view, and lyrics.
Millennials of a certain age will reminiscence fondly about the good old days when MTV actually played music videos — but don’t listen to them. Waiting around for hours on the off chance that your favorite band made it on the air kind of sucked, and being able to instantly pull up exactly the music video we want on YouTube is just infinitely better. Today we’re learning about a new trick in YouTube’s repertoire for displaying music videos on your biggest screens.
The YouTube app for Android TV is picking up a new button in its playback interface, as spotted by 9to5Google. Labeled “Display” and adorned with an eyeball icon, this option only appears when you’re viewing music video content, nestled between the like/dislike and save buttons.
Selecting it with your remote brings up the options above, where you have the choice to continue viewing the music video or switch to one of two alternate views. “Artwork” displays the album cover against a colored background, while “Lyrics” takes that same album background and adds — well, you can probably figure it out. Really, our only complaint there is that the lyrics are rendered quite large for the sort of display sizes we’re dealing with here, and it might be nice to get an option to fit more, smaller lyrics on screen at once.
While this is very cool, there’s still work to be done here, and right now the app doesn’t do a great job at remembering your preferences. If you change Display options for a video and come back to it later, YouTube can remember your choice, but in our testing the app eventually defaults back to the video view. The setting also doesn’t persist between videos, so if you’re watching a lot in a row, you’ll have to keep selecting the Display mode for each. Finally, we notice a distinct change in sound quality when flipping between the video and Artwork/Lyrics modes, suggesting the latter are coming from YouTube Music sources.
YouTube’s new Display options should be available on your Android TV device now, so long as you’re on version 5.22 of the app or later.
