[Andrews54757]

I have trouble watching things without subtitles. I dislike most video players on websites since they don't give you the option to search for or manually upload subtitles.

This and other inconveniences motivated me to make a browser extension to fix bad video players on the internet. It works by replacing the video player with a custom one. It also allows me to see what the manifest URL is and what headers it uses so I can copy it over to VLC if I need to.

The extension is available on Github, you can find it here

https://github.com/Andrews54757/FastStream

[chatmasta]

Nice extension! It would be cool if it could also re-render the page to be _just_ the video player (thus solving the problem in the Gist, with all the ads).

About subtitles: in case an m3u8 stream has them, you can ask VLC to render them with a flag like `--sub-track 0`

[Andrews54757]

Thanks! You can already do that. Open a new tab, and then click the icon to make the player appear. It will fill the whole tab. Then use another tab to find videos on other websites. The new-tab player will automatically collect sources and you can play it by using the sources browser tool. You can then close the tab with the original website.

[tamimio]

> I have trouble watching things without subtitles.

Having subtitles is very convenient. I don’t have to worry about the volume. I can shift back and forth between listening while being busy with something else or reading them. Also, when it comes to movies, a lot of the time the SFX volume is louder than the people's voices, and unless you want to be that annoying neighbor, you have to keep the remote controller in hand to adjust the volume accordingly.

[krackers]

How does it work? Since sites often have their own craptastic JS player that doesn't embed the source stream in the DOM directly.

[Andrews54757]

Most sites still use a player that fetches a ".m3u8" or ".mpd" manifest file. The extension monitors webRequests and triggers when it sees a request to such a file.

[schiffern]

On AMO I get "Installation aborted because the add-on appears to be corrupt."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/faststream/

[Andrews54757]

Really? What browser are you using? Is it up to date?

[schiffern]

Thanks, that fixed it. I was one version behind.