Maybe I'm weird but I discovered this neat thing---

[Ellen Easton]

I couldn't decide where to put this so I hope this area will do. Maybe it will be of interest to others who could do the same thing.

I have a Roku tv and I like to watch YouTube videos where people put on a camera and then walk around various cities filming. There are some that are subtitled and some are narrated, but they're all really awesome. I have an auto-immune disorder and when covid reared its ugly head, I had to make the decision to stay indoors as much as possible and not have a lot of visitors. While doing that, I then discovered the filmed tours and started watching those. I fell right in love with the experience of vicariously walking around all these wonderful places. Some of my favorites are tours of London. The architecture is just exquisite. I decided it would be wonderful to do some "urban sketching" of some of the sites. There are also French villages and tours of Venice and just about everywhere.

For a long time, I was frustrated because when I'd pause the video on a site I wanted to paint, it would have part of the scene obscured by other stuff. It took me a long time but the other day I discovered something. If I pause the video but then push the back button, it stops the picture and gets rid of that stuff on the bottom of the scene and voila! I can use the full screen to sketch and paint from. Eventually the thing times out and puts a screensaver type image on but I might be able to figure out how to either extend the time it stays on my scene or else not produce the screen saver but for now, I just work around it.

 

[Hermes2020]

Thank you for the technical tip. I immediately tried it with a few YouTube videos, but did not experience the problem you mentioned. The reason I don't see the problem could be because I am using a desktop Windows 10 PC with an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card with 8GB video memory, chosen to support the demanding 3D graphics I do. When I pause, the picture is perfectly clear with no annoying overlays. It would be interesting to hear what others experience when they pause YouTube videos.

 

[Ellen Easton]

I'm really tech stupid, so I'm not sure exactly what you've told me there except it seems you're viewing YouTube on a computer instead of Roku tv? I have a laptop and I just tried pausing a video on here. Sure enough, no overlay. I didn't try watching videos on the laptop and pausing them till just now when you mentioned it. I like using the tv because the screen is so big and it seems more like I'm actually "there" but it's good to know the laptop would work if I'm not by the tv..

 

[Hermes2020]

Yes, I am using a PC. Glad my comment helped a bit.

 

[ZenDruid]

You might want to look at Google Earth. This is a 3-D interactive view of the earth from a satellite perspective down to a bird's nest perspective. Google used to charge $400 USD for this download, now they give it away free. I downloaded it and it is a lot of fun for exploring the world. And it's easy to navigate. I visited (via Google video and the internet) my Grandmother's old mining village in central Mexico, where she grew up in the late 1800s. Today, on Google Earth, satellite photography shows it to be a modern little town with cars, school, taverns, grocery stores, etc., and a very rich and productive gold mine.
When you open Google Earth you get a satellite view of Earth from hundreds of miles out. You can rotate the globe to the hemisphere you want, and then zoom in to continent, country, state, county, town, lakes and rivers. When you get close to street level, all of a sudden perspective will change and you will be on the street looking at eye level. You can then travel through the streets like a tourist. Google has sent out video teams by ground vehicle throughout the world to record this since the late 1980's. It's one of the real positive wonders of the internet world. Try it, you'll like it.
For disclosure, I'm running an old tower desktop computer with a 24-inch monitor. Cell phones with little screens are at a lesser advantage.