06:41:00
Believe
it or not, YouTube is the largest online streaming service with around four
billion views per day, with one billion of those coming from mobile devices. A
large part of YouTube’s massive video library is music videos NS there’s a
large portion of Android users that want be able to continue
listening to music on YouTube while using other apps on their Android devices.
Here’s where we show you how to play YouTube videos in the background on
Android.
Check
out our other Android
How-to tutorials.
The
official YouTube app doesn’t allow you to continue to keep playing video, or at
least listen to video, when you exit the app – for now anyway. YouTube Music
Key is currently in beta testing and looks to rival the likes of Spotify,
enabling music streaming from the YouTube app via music from Google Play Music.
It’ll turn the YouTube app into a music streaming/video player hybrid.
However,
there are apps that act as portals to YouTube’s content that’ll allow you to
minimize the app without stopping playback. So all you need to do is download
the right app. There has been a culling of background video players on Google
Play, and it’s hard to find one that still works. We found and tested the app Awesome Pop-up Video and
it worked well for us on a HTC One M8 Smartphone running Android KitKat OS.
Step one: download the app
The
first thing that you are going to need to do is open Google Play on your
Android device and search for the app “Awesome Pop-up Video”. It’s a free app
so you can download it and choose to activate additional (paid) services at a
later date using in-app purchases. Don’t worry though, as you don’t need to
part with any money to use the apps main feature.
Step two: choose your video
Once
the app has been installed, there are two options available. The app will
display some of the most popular YouTube videos of the day for you to easily
listen to by tapping on them, or you can add your own URL to play. If you want
to choose your own music, go to www.youtube.com on
your mobile browser, find the music you want to listen to and copy the URL.
Once
you’ve got the URL, paste it into the window at the top of the page in the
Awesome Pop-up Video app and tap the icon to the right.
Step three: minimize the app and
carry on with what you were doing
Once
you’ve selected your video (via the list or URL input), a small box should open
with your selected video playing. If you close the app once the video appears,
it should stay on screen, allowing you to check Twitter or your messages while
still watching/listening to the video. If it gets in your way, just tap and
drag to move it around your screen and once the video is finished, just tap the
[X] in the corner to close it.
Step four: choose the next song
That’s
pretty much it! Once the song has finished playing, open the app again and
select the next song.
There
are a few points to take note of though; firstly, if you want to listen to
songs longer than five minutes, you’ll have to pay via in-app
purchases. Secondly, we found that if we tried to skip the video
forward/backward, the app would crash and we would have to start over again.
This may be down to compatibility issues with the HTC One M8 we used to test,
but it might also be a general bug that the developer needs to fix.
