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Show HN: A Chrome extension to give you back control over short-form videos

(chromewebstore.google.com)
128 points darajava | 4 comments | 01 Apr 25 11:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

Hi HN! I built this little extension to prevent, in my opinion, the most offensive anti-pattern used by tech companies. That is removing the seek bar in short-form videos.

The "seek bar" is the bar at the bottom of a video that progresses as you play the video, and that you can click on or drag to skip around. Why companies ever thought it was a good idea to get rid of this I don't know, but I find it infuriating, so I decided to add it back for myself and thought others might like it too.

ReelControl adds a progress bar and seeking capabilities to videos on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook Reels.

I do sometimes enjoy watching short-form content and I've found that with this extension enabled I can be more mindful about it and get sucked in way less. I'm also on my phone less because I tend to favor the web versions of these platforms now.

Open source--PRs and issues welcome! https://github.com/darajava/seek-anywhere/

1. ensignavenger ◴[02 Apr 25 19:02 UTC] No.43560250[source]▶
Thanks for releasing it! Whats the chance of this getting shipped to Firefox users? A future improvement might be to add the ability to change the playback speed :)
replies(1): >>43560320 #
2. darajava ◴[02 Apr 25 19:07 UTC] No.43560320[source]▶
Nice idea. Playback rate should be pretty easy to implement!

I've never done a Firefox extension before but I could definitely give it a go.

replies(1): >>43561505 #
3. megadata ◴[02 Apr 25 20:59 UTC] No.43561505[source]▶
And perhaps allow 3x playback speed. It's too fast for me to understand speech on most videos but not all. But some videos are so long winded that it can be tremendously helpful.
replies(1): >>43562052 #
4. darajava ◴[02 Apr 25 21:48 UTC] No.43562052{3}[source]▶
You actually can control playback speed! You can find this on the bottom right of the videos. It doesn't go to 3x though and you can't access it on youtube unless it's in fullscreen for some reason. Will try to figure that out.