MetroTube

The phenomenon of YouTube, which recently celebrated its birthday, is transforming the consumption habits of audiovisual content in a sudden way from human civilization to planetary level.

Billions of hours of video are created, shared and consumed every day around the globe. But it can become a real vice when accessing this universe through an application like Metro Tube for Modern UI for Windows 8.

OMG it's full of videos!

As Dr. David Bowman used to say before going through the monolith, in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 film, and becoming a timeless entity navigating the universe: My God, it's full of stars! ; this is the feeling I had when I opened Metro Tube for the first time.

The ultimate goal of this app, and what you realize when you look up from your monitor and a surprisingly long amount of time has passed, is to offer you an endless collection of videos on the most unexpected topics you can imagine, which are stored on the YouTube platform.

Therefore, the first thing I recommend is, to get all the possibilities of the application, sign up with your YouTube account and thus have the main links at hand..

The information is arranged in different categories that are: Subscriptions, Watch later, Favorites, Uploaded by you and Recent. But MetroTube also offers you the Most Popular and thematic channels.

To the latter you can add whatever you want, building your own from a search on the platform.

The detail of each video

When I click on any thumbnail, I enter the tab of the video itself, where I find the display window that I can enlarge full screen. And that allows me to define, in the configuration section of the “ Charm ” bar, the default resolution that I am going to use.

Below I have access to the author's Channel, the summary and complete description, and the history of comments that, sometimes, is even better than the video itself.

But the danger is on the right… the two lists of videos that remain visible and that are the material related to what I am currently viewing everything posted on the author's YouTube channel.

In less than I expect I see myself jumping from link to link, hallucinating with the things that people record and publish – for better and for worse – and with growing curiosity about what I'm going to find at the next hop.

… and the hours passed, and passed

Of course, the level of absorption reaches deliciously deep levels when I start browsing directly in the most popular categories, jumping from related video to related video and reorienting, from time to time, the results by through a specific search.

In conclusion, an excellent application that also works on Windows 8 RT, to waste time "by the loads". And enjoy the life and experiences of other people seen through a lens.

If anything, several buts. One that does not allow me to access and manage my playlists – for example the music that I use as a radio in the background; neither does it let me enter a channel and tell it to launch the entire list sequentially, having to press one by one on each thumbnail; and finally that it does not work in the background, having to use it in a multitasking window to have the reproduction “alive”.

Highly, highly recommended for users who are fond of YouTube.

More information | MetroTube in Store