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

(chromewebstore.google.com)
128 points darajava | 1 comments | 01 Apr 25 11:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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/

Show context
NelsonMinar ◴[02 Apr 25 23:38 UTC] No.43563088[source]▶
It's horrible that the web has come to this, a need for a browser hack to restore the UI that some website hacked off.
replies(2): >>43563479 #>>43563689 #
montag ◴[03 Apr 25 01:25 UTC] No.43563689[source]▶
Product designers are going to experiment...Vote with your feet. Don't use horrible products. The only thing worse would be EU mandated progress bars
replies(1): >>43564875 #
mrgoldenbrown ◴[03 Apr 25 04:50 UTC] No.43564875[source]▶
I would love to vote with my feet. How do I watch YouTube or Instagram content with VLC, or some other user friendly video player?
replies(2): >>43567731 #>>43568984 #
1. jraph ◴[03 Apr 25 13:01 UTC] No.43568984[source]▶
mpv understands URLs to these websites and uses yt-dlp to download them.

On KDE, I assigned an action to open some URLs with mpv, which means I can play then from the clipboard manager or the copy menu that is displayed when copying if it's enabled.