elgiano/ytSamplerTools

Javascript tools to play with YouTube

ytSamplerTools

Some javascript tools to play youtube as a sampler

Installation and usage

You can install ytSamplerTools as a bookmarklet:

• Go to gianlucaelia.eu/ytSamplerTools.
• Right-click on the astronaut and save it as a bookmark.

Once you have the bookmark you can:

• go to youtube
• open a video
• click the bookmark to inject ytSamplerTools into the page
• start playing :)

(you could also host the content of the dist folder on your own server and get your own bookmarklet to fetch code from there)

Features

Most features are implemented as functions you need to call from your browser console, once you have loaded the bookmarklet.

Preloading with node-ytdl-core

First issue with playing youtube is that its adaptive streaming feature makes it lag a lot. Now you can preload your video, and skip through it as fast as possible.

Note: your browser needs to disable CORS for preloading to work. This is not recommended when browsing the Internet in general, because disabling CORS can create security vulnerabilities. I personally use a browser extension to disable CORS only when I'm playing with ytSampler: on Firefox I use CORS Everywhere and on Chromium CORS Unblock.

To preload the current video run:

p()

Pitch and speed

Browsers change video speed by time-stretching, without affecting pitch by default, but you can enable a tape-style speed control by running:

ps(true)

and of course if you pass false instead you'll go back to default time-stretching mode

Change speed

sp(); // prints current speed
sp(0.5); // sets speed to 0.5
modSpeed(1.5); // multiplies current speed by 1.5
randSpeed(0.5, 1.5); // sets a random speed between 0.5 and 1.5

Seeking around

curPos(); // prints current position
seek(12.3); // seeks to 12.3 seconds
seekD(1.5); // seeks 1.5 forward
seekD(-2, 4.5); // seeks by a random value between -2 and 4.5 seconds
seekRand(); // seeks somewhere random

Common loop functions

// seek 1 second backwards, every second (note: this drifts due to unprecise timing)
stut(1);

// save current position and seek back to it every second(doesn't drift, can still be unprecise with loop length though)
stut2(1);

// note: since stut2 saves a precise position, seeking around doesn't affect its start point. To change position and loop from there you need to reset stut2.
// move randomly within 10 seconds and loop from there:
seekD(-5, 5); stut2(1);
// move to 0:30 and loop from there
seek(30); stut2(1);

// stutter with random duration, here between 1 and 3 seconds
stut2(1, 3);

// stop stuttering
stut(0);

// seek and stutter
l("a", ()=>{seek(rand(10,100)); stut2(1.2)}, ()=>rand(5,15));
l.stop("a");

// stop all loops and stutters
l.stop()

Sequences

// sequence of seek positions
s = seq([10, 20, 30])
l(0, ()=>{seek(s.next)}, ()=>rand(1,3))

// sequence of speeds
p = seq([1, 1.25, 1.5, 15/8])
l(1, ()=>{sp(p.next)}, ()=>rand(1,3))

// seek to position randomly chosen from a list
l(2, ()=>{seek(choose([1,2,3,4]))}, ()=>1)

Development

Clone this repo and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/elgiano/ytSamplerTools
cd ytSamplerTools
npm install

If you are making changes to ytSamplerTools and want to run a local version, you can get started by running watchify (to recompile every time you make changes), and a local server to give you the updated code:

npm run watch & npm start

Then if you go to http://localhost:8080 you can get a bookmarklet for your local version