back to top

YouTube’s ‘pinch to zoom’ experimental feature rolls out and lets you zoom into specific parts of YouTube videos on a smartphone.

Follow Us
placeholder text

Zooming into the specific part of the video was not available on YouTube; it had been missing for a long time. It comes in handy if we want to take a closer look at something; this is something Google has been working on for YouTube. YouTube’s recent experiments now allow users to zoom into specific parts of videos. Nevertheless, it has a limitation: YouTube only allows for pinching into a video up to the full width of a taller (18:9, 19.5:9, 20:9).

However, this feature is currently in the initial phase of testing. This feature is not available to everyone, and only Premium members can use it as of now. It might be possible for Google to scrap this or roll it out later to everyone. The YouTube Video Zoom feature will be available until September 1st.

YouTube “Pinch to Zoom”

Users need to enable this feature in the YouTube experiment section.

  • Open YouTube Settings.
  • Go to Try the new feature.
  • Click on Try it out to enable this feature.
  • It takes some time, but within 10 minutes, less or more, it will be enabled.

After enabling this, you can pinch the video player with two fingers to zoom in and out. YouTube collects user feedback before rolling it out to everyone, and you can zoom in on video at up to 8x.

It seems very useful for students to zoom in on a video for a bit of text. Otherwise, for anyone who wants to get small details, Not to mention: Zooming into the video will not be as crisp and clear at this time, but we can expect Google to optimise it more for a better result in the future.