Release Notes: Community-designed Doodle, global Halloween films, easier bug reporting, virtual keyboard...

With it being Halloween season and all, we've got an especially spoooooky edition of Release Notes for you.

First-ever user-designed Doodle: You may have noticed that once in a while, we change our homepage logo to match a special occasion -- for example, we've done it for Earth Day, the finale of YouTube Play, and yesterday's one billionth subscription milestone. But this Halloween we're especially jazzed because the Doodle you'll see on the homepage was designed by xperpetualmotion, a YouTube community member and Rhode Island School of Design student. Here's how she came up with the icon you see below: "I tried out a lot of different Halloween imagery before deciding on the classic 'holes cut out of a white sheet' ghost. It makes me smile every time, because what else could this kid possibly have under there that makes him that shape? I wanted the logo to be something fun and clever, and I hope everyone loves it as much as I do!" We certainly do! Thank you, Karen.

YouTube's first user-designed Doodle, by xperpetualmotion

Global Halloween films: If you're in the U.S., U.K., Canada or Australia, we've got some exciting news to add to your seasonal mirth: our friends at Crackle made sure their Halloween offerings could be viewed by horror fans around the world, marking the first time a studio's made several full-length movies simultaneously available in multiple territories on YouTube. Click here for regional viewing dates for Underworld: Evolution, Idle Hands, Mary Reilly, The Blob and The Bride.

Report a bug: No, we don't mean the creepy crawly kind, but the kind that may indicate something's broken. If you come across a problem on the site, scroll down to the new "report a bug" link at the bottom of any YouTube page. Clicking it will allow you to take an easy screenshot of the page and add further details in the pop-up box:

New "Send feedback" form

African language launches: YouTube's now available in Amharic and Swahili. Click on the language link at the bottom of the page to change your language settings.

Type non-English text with the virtual keyboard: We've made it easy for people to find videos in non-Latin script-based languages; the on-screen keyboard is available in 26 languages (Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Vietnamese, Slovenian, Romanian, Ukrainian). To use the virtual keyboard, switch the language of the site to one of the supported languages and click on the keyboard icon in the search box.

Here's where you can turn on the virtual keyboard

More efficient 3D player: Our new player for 3D videos is much faster than the previous player, especially for HD resolution. Try enjoying your favorite 3D clips in high resolution and full screen with no lag.

The BooooooTube Team

UPDATE (8pm PT):  We just received this video from Karen, to go along with her Doodle:

Release Notes: Seven new languages, four new countries get partner program, and lots more...

Bits and bobs that’ve gone live since our last Release Notes...

YouTube is now available in...: Arabic, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese!

Four new countries get YouTube Partner Program: The Partner Program continued its expansion this quarter, with launches in Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand and the Czech Republic. That makes 21 countries in which people can make money from their videos. For more information about partnerships, click here.

Crossfades, wipes and slides: The video editor lets you combine and trim your videos right on YouTube.com, without installing any software. Now you can add transitions, like crossfades and wipes, between video clips. Just select the transitions tab in the media picker, drag the transition and drop it between any two videos in the storyboard.

MySpace Autoshare: Automatically share your YouTube activities on your MySpace account (you can already do this on your Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Reader and Orkut accounts). To hook this up, go to Account > ActivitySharing and click “Connect accounts” next to the MySpace logo.

More filtering for charts: YouTube Charts can now be filtered by categories such as Comedy, Gaming and Pets & Animals, in addition to time and popularity "slices." We also show more results (20) per page.


Improved screen reader accessibility for YouTube player: One of our engineering interns spent part of his summer improving video accessibility for visually impaired people. If you use a screen reader that supports Flash, we hope you'll find it easier to enjoy videos on YouTube now. We've also added some more captioning features to the YouTube Data API. You can list tracks, request auto-timing, and download the speech recognition captions for videos that you own.

Shows in France: If you’re a YouTube viewer in France, now you can watch full-length TV shows, like BFMTV: Bourdin Direct and Britain’s Got Talent. Check out the page here.

HD and CC badges on search results page: When you search for a video on YouTube, the search results now show HD and CC (Closed Caption) badges, in addition to the NEW, CHANNEL and PLAYLIST badges that already exist. If you click on the badge, it will filter out results that don’t fall under that category.


“Add-to playlist” widget: The [+] button on video thumbnails in search results now includes a menu that allows you to add the video to any one of your playlists or start a new playlist. Additionally, the "save to" button below the video is being renamed "add to" and will have the same functionality.


Visited video styling on search results and video pages: Browsers help people remember links they have previously clicked on by giving them a different color, the standard generally being that links are in blue and visited links are in purple. Many sites, including YouTube, opt to make all links blue regardless of visited state to give a more consistent look to the site and better reflect its dynamic nature. However, having a visited state is specifically useful when exhaustively exploring search results or related videos, and so we are launching a new style for thumbnails and links to videos in related and search results: the thumbnail for visited videos is slightly grayed, and the link color has changed. This should help you explore the site deeper without going in circles.

The YouTube Team

Enjoy YouTube in Croatian, Filipino, Serbian and Slovak

Starting today, you can experience YouTube in four new languages: Croatian, Filipino, Serbian and Slovak. This brings the grand total of languages we support to 28, a nearly 50% increase since the beginning of 2010. (And remember: by selecting automated captions on a video, you can experience that video in over 50 languages.) Take a look at the languages we've launched since the start of YouTube:

By the end of this year, our goal is to offer the YouTube experience in 40 languages, doubling the number we started with at the top of 2010. With each new rollout, we hope to make YouTube a bit more accessible to more people, regardless of where in the world they might live. For more information, please watch the “YouTube Answers: Worldwide” video, which tackles your most popular questions about our international sites and operations.

Brian Truong, Product Manager, recently watched “Flower Warfare - Behind the Scenes.”