cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/5599576
Does a Firefox equivalent to TubeSift Bookmarker exist?
I did a brief search of Firefox extensions, but couldn’t find anything. Most of the ad-related YouTube extensions seemed devoted to blocking ads, rather than archiving and cataloguing them.
My current workflow is as follows:
- Right-click on the video player, select “Copy debug info”
- Alt+Tab to a text editor
- Ctrl+V the debug info into text editor
- Ctrl+F for “addocid”
- Ctrl+C the advertisment video id
- Alt+Tab back to browser
- Ctrl+N to open new browser window
- Type “
youtu.be/
”- Ctrl+V the video id
- Wait a fraction of a second for the URL to redirect from
youtu.be/[video_id]
tohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[video_id]&feature=youtu.be
tohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[video_id]
- Ctrl+D to bookmark the video
- Ctrl+W to close the browser window
I can usually do this in under 15 seconds, but I would like to find a faster (or completely automatic) method. Does anyone have any recommendations?
P.S. As for why I want to do this, I like to have the option of rewatching or referencing an interesting or funny ad at a later date. Most ads are unlisted videos, which makes them nigh impossible to look up.
Update: I partially automated my workflow using AutoHotKey.
You are weirder than I am but thats okay, I love weird people
I really have to ask… To what end? Are you building a collection of ads that you feel will be lost media?
Are you building a collection of ads that you feel will be lost media?
Yeah, more or less. Every YouTube pre-roll advertisement is also just a regular video on the platform, but often the video is often unlisted. I’ve had a couple cases where I thought “I remember a funny ad about that” or “I remember a unique cut of this movie trailer” once the ad is no longer running, and I haven’t been able to find them. A way to autosave every pre-roll ad would give me the option of looking them up later.
I misread this as block youtube ads, but i have been here, although I am never watching yt ads again, this seems helpful
You could write a macro/userscript(Grease/TemperMonkey? idk) that does your manual steps automcatically?
Thanks, this is a good idea. I started to look into it, but then ran into some challenges in parsing the JavaScript to extract the video ID of the ad:
- https://sh.itjust.works/post/19366883
- https://programming.dev/post/14154611
- https://lemmy.world/post/15453671
Do you have any experience with JavaScript?
I have a lot of university stuff going on but I will try in the next week or so. If I don’t respond, DM me.
Wow, thanks for your offer to help! I’ve added a lemmy.world link to the post of what I’ve tried so far. Should open on your home instance.
Why not do the steps you outlined above as a macro on your keyboard? This eliminates the need for JS. To extract the video URL, you could use some RegEx automatically or
Ctrl+F
.Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve done pretty much exactly what you describe using AutoHotKey.