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Loop Video

Loop video is a browser extension that allows dividing a video into sections and looping through these sections. Created loops can be saved. Intended to work on any HTML videos, i.e. across all sites.

Description

If you've ever used the looping ability on Youtube but felt like it's a little too simple in some cases, this extension was designed with that in mind. You'd like to have the video play over and over, but want to skip those ads at the start, middle, and end of the video. Loop Video allows creating sections for the video: You can start a section just after the first ad ends and end the section at the start of the midroll ad, creating another section starting after the midroll and ending just before the ad at the end. Now, you can start the looping, and only the sections will play such that the ads are skipped.

Key features of Loop Video:

  • Designed to work with any video, so should be usable on any site that uses the HTML video element for its video capabilities.

  • Loop data can be saved per-URL so loops can be created for multiple pages and loaded back between browser sessions. Private session data is always deleted. Data can also be saved to and loaded from file, allowing making backups or sharing loops etc.

  • Created loops can be browsed. Loops can be given titles, descriptions, and tags, and the list of created loops can be filtered based on these details. The list has links associated with each loop, allowing for quick access to the page the loop was created for.

See more details in the manual, and check out the basic usage examples.

Important

Data is currently saved in localStorage, which could be wiped or run out of space. Backup your data if you're worried about losing it! See the technical details for more information.

Development

Requirements

For development, the following tools are needed (unless just building using Docker; see further below):

The following tools are optional, but may be useful:

In the above, versioning is the recommended versioning, but other versions may also work.

Development has been carried out on Linux (Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS). Development requirements on other platforms may differ.

Developing

  1. Create the file _config.ts (see the example file) in the root directory, and export the values BINARY_FIREFOX and BINARY_CHROME from there: 

    // replace <path/to/firefox/binary> with the path to your firefox binary
export const BINARY_FIREFOX = "<path/to/firefox/binary>"
// do the same as above but for chrome
export const BINARY_CHROME = "<path/to/chrome/binary>"

    The string can be left empty (or any string value) if development isn't being done using that browser.

    It is recommended that the firefox binary be a development version of the browser. The supplied binary will be used as the development browser; see wxt.config.ts.

  2. Install packages: 

    pnpm install

  3. Use the appropriate dev command to start hot-reload development. For Firefox: 

    pnpm dev:firefox --mv3
    and for Chrome: 
    pnpm dev --mv3

    the flag --mv3 specifies that Manifest V3 is to be used. See the package.json scripts section for more details about the commands.

    These commands open up the appropriate browser specified in step 1 with the extension loaded, and will hot-reload the extension.

Building

The easiest way to build the extension is using Docker (see the requirements). From the root of the directory, 

sh ./docker/build.sh
will build the extension and output the build artifacts to .output/; If sh is not available, see the executed script file for the commands or use another suitable shell. This will create the zipped build artifacts: a Firefox-suitable extension, a Chrome-suitable extension, and the source code. Building like this should only require Docker.

To build the extension more manually, The Dockerfile itself shows the steps needed to do that, but in short, replacing step 3 in the 'developing' section with 

pnpm zip:firefox --mv3
or for Chrome, 
pnpm zip --mv3
should do the job. These command will build the extension for the particular browser and output the zipped extension contents to .output/. See also build.sh in the root.