How to loop part of any YouTube video

YouTube already lets you loop an entire video, but it's not easy to loop just one part of a video – something dancers in particular really need, because we often want to watch a specific sequence or move over, and over, and over to really master it.

There are a lot of YouTube looping apps out there, but they're not particularly good, which prompted us to build a free, simple web app to loop any YouTube video (to try it out, you can even just load a random video from 'Dancers Guide').

You(Sentu)be

To make things even easier, whenever you're watching YouTube video you can just edit the web address and add 'sen' into it: yousentube.com/... to load up our looping app with the video you're watching.

Neat, huh? Here's a video showing how it works:

Using 'Loop a video'

Start a loop

When you first tap 'Start Loop' on a video, the app sets a starting loop point, with a draggable orange marker:

End loop

When you're close to where you want the loop to end, you just tap 'Stop Loop' to create an end-of-loop marker in red, which you can also drag to edit:

Now you're done! The video will keep playing between those loop points.

If you try to click on the grey playback bar it will jump to the closest point in the loop.

Disable the loop

If you'd prefer to still explore around the video while keeping the loop points, you just have to tap the loop icon to the right to temporarily disable the looping functionality (but keep your loop points):

Just tap the loop icon again to enable it.

Sharing loops

If you want to share your loop with friends, you just have to tap 'Copy' and the link will be copied to your clipboard, allowing you to paste it in a chat, email, or wherever you'd like:

If you don't want to mess about with copying and pasting the link, you can directly share to Facebook, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Twitter:

If you're not happy with the loop, you can click 'Reset' to clear the loop points.

Advanced Tips

Moving both loop points

You can click or drag between loop points if you need to shift them both a little:

Fine-grained tweaking of loop points

Sometimes dragging the handles of the loop points doesn't give you the control you want, especially for longer videos.

In that situation you can get a tiny bit technical, and directly edit the web address.

We've built the app in a way that allows you to edit the time position of the start and end points of each loop, and if you change those, the loops automatically change.

If this is a little unclear, here's a little animation where we change the start loop point to be 23 seconds, instead of 22 seconds.

If you look carefully, you can see that there are actually two times at the end of this address. The first is the start loop time, and the second is the end loop time.

The time can be broken down to seconds (s), and even milliseconds (ms). In the example above you can see the end loop point is actually 51 seconds, and 900 milliseconds.

While a neat feature if you want to specify the exact time for a loop point, for most situations you can get away with not worrying about this more advanced feature.

Wrapping up

That's a quick overview of our free little web looping app. Keep an eye out for enhancements in the future, and if you've got any feedback just get in touch via the website chat, email, or Facebook.

If you want even greater control over looping video content to build a personal movement library, check out our mobile app Sentu.