How to get the best YouTube experience on Windows 10 with myTube

myTube is one of the most popular Microsoft Store apps and a premiere YouTube client, but there are some tricks you need to know to get the absolute best experience.

Some of these are workarounds required because YouTube doesn't make the app and others are just features many might not know about. Here's how to get the best myTube — and YouTube — experience on Windows 10.

myTube has a free trial version with a few restrictions or you can pay for the full version for $0.99

Get on Microsoft Store (opens in new tab)

Get it on the Xbox One

While the Xbox One is one of the only places you'll see an official YouTube app on Windows, using myTube on the Xbox One has its advantages.

First, you get the design of myTube, which is more conducive to reading comments and seeing more content.

Next, you get background audio support. This lets you play music, podcasts, and more contents in the background while you focus on games or other activities on the Xbox One.

Lastly, you can manually select video quality to make sure that your content is streamed smoothly or doesn't use up too much of your data.

Use myTube Companion

Windows 10 has the ability to open links from websites directly in app. Unfortunately, YouTube won't play nicely with Windows 10 and this feature has to be approved by the website owner.

To get around this you can use myTube Companion. It's a free extension available on all the most popular browsers that will prompt your PC to open any YouTube links in myTube.

It's new and needs some polish, such as closing the tab that opens when clicking a link, but it works well. The developer seems keen to add new features and fix issues based on his comments on our post announcing the app so it's reasonable to expect that this extension will only get better over time.

Use compact Overlay

Compact Overlay, or picture-in-picture, lets you keep a persistent window above all other apps and programs on your PC. It's handy on the desktop and incredibly useful in tablet mode. myTube Handles Compact Overlay beautifully and lets you watch YouTube content more easily while multitasking.

The feature isn't as common as it should be, but myTube makes it easy to jump back and forth between full screen and picture-in-picture.

Timeline

myTube has about every UWP feature that you could pack into an app, including Timeline Support. This means you can easily scroll through your timeline and find a video you were watching previously.

You could use the history function of course but opening up your Timeline and scrolling to a video is more elegant and could be faster in some cases.

Summing things up

myTube Is arguably the best way to enjoy YouTube on Windows devices. But if you're used to using a browser for YouTube or the Xbox One app, you might not know about some of myTube's best features.

Additionally, myTube being a third party app means that some extra effort is required to get some features, such as opening YouTube links into the app.

But if you know all the ins and outs of myTube you'll be able to not only get as good of an experience as anything on Android, Chrome, or iOS, you'll get an even better one.

Get on Microsoft Store (opens in new tab)

Sean Endicott brings nearly a decade of experience covering Microsoft and Windows news to Windows Central. He joined our team in 2017 as an app reviewer and now heads up our day-to-day news coverage. If you have a news tip or an app to review, hit him up at sean.endicott@futurenet.com (opens in new tab).

22 Comments

I'm not so hot on myTube. There are simple playback issues for sure, and navigation isn't as straightforward and powerful as it is in the browser experience. But I think the most annoying thing is the lack of power over your viewing preferences - indicating to YouTube that you're not interested in this video or that, fine-tuning your suggestions, etc. You can't do any of that in myTube. Hell, you can't even edit your comments.
Mytube is awesome! My biggest gripe is picture in picture. I can't figure out a way to get it to not default to it when you click back from a playing video. I don't use the feature (I've got enough things to focus on, I don't need another thing playing while I'm reading something else). So, I'd like to disable it. I understand why others might like that feature though.
Here you go 😊
settings/ playback/ turn off continue playing when I leave video.
Thanks! For some reason I missed that when I looked.
Oh Glad to help.
I l ike the Rooms feature!
I use myTube on all my Windows devices (Lumia, Surface, Xbox One X). The app have a few flaws, but it still the best 3rd party app for YouTube, imho. The playback function has some issues and skipping parts of the video isn't flawless. But 9 of 10 times the app works great. The ONLY thing I really MISS, are subtitles. Would be great if the developer add subtitles in myTube ^_^
Talked to him about the feature. Subtitles which are uploaded by the youtube channel are supported. But, youtube api don't have automatic subtitle feature. That's why he can't do anything regarding this.
I want to love myTube, but a couple of missing features are critical to the way I use YouTube. 1) Remember the playback speed!
2) I can't edit the order of videos in my Watch Later list It would be great if you could mark a list to save to disk so those videos are always available when your don't have access to the internet. myTube would be responsible for cleaning up the downloads when a video is removed from the list. That would be great.
It does remember the playback speed since the last update
You can right click ->; Select a video, then select more than one at a time. When finished, click the checkmark and click "Save"
Sadly mytube still has crashing mid video that forces u to re-open the app. Or having trouble of starting a video properly before playing normally. Besides that its the best YouTube app available. Watching 4K etc works perfect.
try app reset
Use it on my Phone, tablets/PCs and Xboxes. Love it.
My only complain is the "Add to" button.
It'd be nice to have a search field, or if the list is in alphabet order.
Only thing missing to me are jump back/forward 10 sec buttons. It's hard to finely navigate long videos now.
It is there. Use arrow keys to skip -5/+5 sec. OR use keys 'J' and 'L' to skip -10/+10. Don't even think that is odd. Because youtube official web player is also controlled by same keys in same manner.
But, I would definitely like the option to choose the skip seconds in settings by arrow keys.
Cool to see the myTube Companion mentioned!
I'll look into it the odd behavior you mentioned, it never showed in any of my testing. The Companion received a pretty hefty update recently, so it may be fixed already.
I use MyTube since its came out on WP. Certainly the best YouTube app in the windows ecosystem so far!
1. Open up Google Chrome, and head to YouTube.
2. Open up menu and save site to desktop (remember to check open in new window.)
3. Pin your new desktop shortcut to Taskbar. Congrats!! Your Windows 10 now has the 'official' Youtube, right on the Taskbar.
You lost me at Chrome 🤣
Ok and how to do that on a lumia 950 music.youtube site
not working on edge here :(

Show more comments