YouTube, earlier this year, added storyboards to their video player that give users a much a better idea of what’s inside any YouTube video. For instance, here’s the YouTube generated storyboard of the popular Thriller album.
Internally, YouTube splits the video into multiple segments and each of these segments is represented with a single image frame. All these frames are then stitched together to form one big image that can help you visualize the entire video at a glance. Storyboard are now available for most YouTube videos including the longer ones like feature films.
See all the Storyboard of any YouTube video.
When you watch a video on YouTube, your browser downloads the corresponding storyboard images in the background but you never get to see them in raw form.
You can either hunt for the downloaded images in the browser’s cache or if you want a more simple solution, just add the following YouTube Frames bookmarklet to your browser.
Then open any video on the YouTube website (it won’t work for embedded videos), click the bookmarklet and it should display all the still image frames of that video on one page.
The bookmarklet (source code) was tested in Chrome 21 and IE 10.
