[lerxst00]

I recently had a similar experience: I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I like reading through the comments. Often, comments quote specific timestamps from the video and I would find it a pain to keep scrolling between the comment section at the bottom of the page and the video at the top and then find the specific time in the video that the comment was talking about.

So, I created a Chrome extension that surfaces YouTube comments that have timestamps right below the video, around the time that the comment contains. And, then disappears it after a few seconds.

It was fun to make and in the end, it solved a very specific problem that I was facing.

Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-timed-comm...

[jamesmoss]

This is awesome, I have the exact same problem. One thing though, when I go to install the extension it asks to read and change data on youtube.com, which makes sense, but also wants permission to access my browsing history. Just wondering why this is?

http://shots.moss.io/a67bd6/Screenshot%202019-09-19%20at%201...

[lerxst00]

Chrome shows that warning if your extension requests access to the 'tabs' permission. https://developer.chrome.com/apps/permission_warnings#view_w...

In this case, it is needed to get the url and id of the tab. I'll have to go back and check if I can make do without depending on that because I agree it does not make sense for this extension to need 'access to my browsing history'. Also, I do intend to put the code up and link it in the extension description page soon, so you don't have to take my word for it!

Thanks for pointing this out.

[Crinus]

I had a similar case... i want to be able to download interesting videos with youtube-dl in case they or me go offline but i found having to copy the url, open a command line, move the proper folder, etc, type youtube-dl and paste the url be a bit cumbersome, so i wrote a Firefox extension to do all that for me.

This is extremely specific (and i had to switch to Firefox Developer Edition to do that since the mainline one doesn't allow unsigned extensions) but it was helpful and i got to learn how to make extensions for personal use (though the whole process to call an external program was a convoluted PITA involving adding registry entries, writing Python scripts to parse JSON, etc... meh).

[Adverblessly]

For a similar usecase I settled on writing a bash script along the lines of

  PARAM=`xclip -o -selection clipboard`
  notify-send downloading $PARAM
  youtube-dl $PARAM

And setting a keyboard shortcut to invoke it, so downloading is just

  CTRL+L (select URL)
  CTRL+C (copy selection)
  CTRL+ALT+D (trigger download script)

[jeegsy]

Damn Son! I have had the same issue and your solution is so face palm simple! Excellent.

[Ididntdothis]

This is actually not even that specific. I did the same thing a few years ago and I bet a lot of other people could use it. One lesson I learned was that writing browser extensions is quite cumbersome if you want to do something that's a little outside the normal use case.

[rasz]

I use tempermonkey for simple stuff like this, takes 2-5 minutes to write something without deploying full extension.

[acollins1331]

But when you click the timestamp in the comment doesn't it automatically jump the video to that point? It's worked that way for me for years...

[frosted-flakes]

Yes, and then you lose your place in the comments.

[NoodleIncident]

I think the back button might still get you back to your place in the comments, but it is a lot of page refreshes. It also messes with the progress bar you see in the thumbnail if you see the video somewhere else on the site again, you might think you didn't finish watching the video.

[lerxst00]

It does. But that also means that you have almost surely navigated away from watching the video.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Thanks for sharing.

You’re definitely not the only person who has this issue.

It’s definitely something YouTube could implement if they weren’t content with the minor tyre fix they’ve built.

[lerxst00]

You're welcome!

The only issue I have now is that I've moved on to using Firefox. So, I can't really use this extension anymore.

I guess that sounds like another 'niche problem' that needs solving.

[hellweaver666]

Chrome extensions are quite trivial to port to Firefox these days. One of my colleagues built a chrome extension and had the firefox version working minutes later.

[CalRobert]

This Firefox user would love a port...

[TheSpiceIsLife]

You wouldn’t be alone there either.

[mtgx]

This might help:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

[lerxst00]

Oh, I wasn't aware of this. I'm going to try this out this weekend.

Thanks for sharing.

[zhte415]

That sounds very cool. Have you heard of bilibili.com? It's a video streaming website, but where comments are timestamped and scroll overlaid on the video at that timestamp, hugely entertaining, somewhat like sitting with 1000 videojockies at the same time. Mainly Chinese language, as it's a Chinese site. Worth having a look though, similar gist.

[darkwizard42]

Nice! This sounds similar to SoundCloud which allows for comments attached to timestamps (great for music, “what a chord”, “the drop here!”)

[ignoramous]

...and medium blog posts with highlights.

[qqn]

I wish we could combine all this stuff together regardless of media. I'd use it in a heartbeat to curate class notes and recorded lectures! Particularly with a community this would be awesome, harnessing everyone's highlighting to pull out a veritable "best of" the course, without losing any context!

[ignoramous]

If you do most of your research in-browser, you should look at u/burtonator's https://getpolarized.io/

[qqn]

This program is wonderful, I regularly use it for highlighting and annotating PDFs. Just imagine this with a SoundCloud-like "highlighter/annotator" for AV files thrown in the mix.

[zhte415]

There was once a thing called Google Wave which would have got pretty close in it's proto form, and had it continued being developed probably would have allowed this and more.

[qqn]

Yes, just it would house all my thoughts on someone else's computer. That's a big deal-breaker for me.

[thaumasiotes]

Viki includes this as a regular feature. You can leave comments on timestamps, and those comments flash at the appropriate time (if you have them enabled).

[mettamage]

Downloaded it, installed it. This is fun!