Now Everyone Can Try YouTube Sleep Timer
If you go to bed in complete silence every night, it may seem strange that a service like YouTube adds a sleep timer. You watch YouTube videos while you’re awake, not when you go to bed! But hey, some of us actually need something—anything! — plays in the background to help you fall asleep every night, and YouTube is sort of the perfect tool for this: the service offers a virtually unlimited supply of long, monotonous videos to play. to help you sleep. The problem is that some of them are so long that you risk waking up with the video still playing.
This is where a sleep timer can come in handy: If you know it will take you about 20 minutes to fall asleep, you can set your sleep timer to 20 minutes (maybe a little longer to be on the safe side). When the timer expires, playback stops, your computer can go to sleep, and you won’t have to worry about losing power or being woken up by a loud commercial break.
Using YouTube’s built-in sleep timer
Until today, YouTube had only tested this feature with Premium subscribers. If you’ve paid for YouTube, you can go to the YouTube Experimental Features page , enable this option, and get another benefit of your subscription.
However, now each of us should find the Sleep Timer option in our YouTube apps, regardless of our account status. Once this feature is available to you, you can access it by clicking on the settings icon on any video you play. You can set the timer for 10, 15, 20, 30, 45 or 60 minutes or the length of the video.
You can already use a sleep timer on your phone
However, you don’t have to rely on YouTube’s sleep timer. If you have an iPhone, you have a built-in sleep timer that you can use to play any media. To use it, open the Clock app, then tap the Timers tab. Set the timer for any time you want, then click When the timer ends . Scroll down and select Stop Playing . Start the timer and then play the YouTube video. Once your timer expires, your iPhone will stop playing and lock itself so you don’t wake up and lose extra battery life.
If you’re using Android, there’s no built-in equivalent. Your best bet is to download a third-party app designed for this task, such as Kuczera’s Sleep Timer . If you have a Samsung device, this Reddit post also discusses a possible automation you can set up to stop playback after a certain period of time:
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Open modes and procedures.
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Click Programs in the bottom right corner, then select the plus icon in the top right corner.
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In the “If” section, select the “Run manually” command.
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In the “Then” section, add the “Wait before next action” command. Here you can choose how long the timer will run.
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Back in the Next section, add the Close App command, then select the app you want to close. In this case it’s YouTube.
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Name the procedure and click Save .
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Whenever you want to start the timer, click Play .