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Sometimes I am playing a fullscreen game on one monitor while watching a video on the other. Oftentimes the game I play has no "fullscreen window" mode. (right now I'm playing one that only has 640x480 fullscreen!)

Occasionally something happens in the video that I miss because I'm focused on the game, and I want to rewind the video to see it. For VLC, this is easy, because I can set up a global keybind for seeking. However, for YouTube, I have no choice but to hit alt+tab, wait while Windows takes my primary monitor out of fullscreen mode, focus the relevant browser window, hit the left key, then return to the game and wait for it to go fullscreen again. This is immensely annoying.

What I want to be able to do is to hit a key combination while playing and have the YouTube video seek backwards, without focus ever leaving the fullscreen game.

I tried the following AutoHotKey script:

#NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
#Warn  ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.
SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%  ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.

CheckVideoSeekId() {
  global VIDEO_SEEK_WINDOW_ID


if (VIDEO_SEEK_WINDOW_ID = "" or not WinExist("ahk_id" VIDEO_SEEK_WINDOW_ID)) {
    ToolTip, No window set for video control.
    SetTimer, RemoveToolTip, -4000
    SoundPlay, *-1  ; plays the system "beep" sound
    return 0
  }
  return 1
}


RemoveToolTip() {
  ToolTip
}


^!+Insert::
  VIDEO_SEEK_WINDOW_ID := WinExist("A")
  ToolTip, Active window set for video control.
  SetTimer, RemoveToolTip, -4000
  return


^!+End::
  if (CheckVideoSeekId()) {
    ControlSend, , {Left}, ahk_id %VIDEO_SEEK_WINDOW_ID%
  }
  return


^!+PgDn::
  if (CheckVideoSeekId()) {
    ControlSend, , {Right}, ahk_id %VIDEO_SEEK_WINDOW_ID%
  }
  return

These are intended to make it so that you can press

Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Insert once while YouTube is focused, and then be able to press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+End/PgDn while any window is focused in order to seek.

Unfortunately… Ctrl+Alt+Shift+End/PgDn do not appear to function at all when a window besides the browser is focused… and even when the browser is focused, each press of the key combinations seems to have only a 20% random chance (!!!) of actually seeking the video. (and only in Chrome; for Firefox and Edge, it just doesn't work at all!)

(Note: I tried sending other keys like Up/Down with other tabs active and it seems like the browser receives the keys just fine; the issue is specifically when the keys are supposed to control YouTube's player)

How can I do this?

Note: This question is tagged autohotkey, but the solution does not need to involve AutoHotKey; I just need something that works on Windows.

Giacomo1968
  • 58,727
Exp HP
  • 404

1 Answers1

1

Two ways:

  1. The actual proper solution is to use the mediakey events "seekbackwards" and "seekforwards". They are supported in all browsers these days, but I haven't checked if YouTube responds to them — I think it does though. You could set up an autohotkey script to throw those events upon a global keypress. Here's some info on that.

  2. The solution I actually found first and that works for me: If your media keyboard has previous/next track buttons, and you're using chrome, then there's a chrome plugin called "Media Keys for YouTube" that rebinds those keys to go forwards/backwards by 5 seconds. This also works if Chrome doesn't have focus.

    After a change in YouTube, the extension has a bug that the devs haven't fixed. The play button doesn't work properly anymore. You can fix the bug by removing the play and pause handlers in the extension, but you have to be comfortable with running unpacked extensions in chrome. If you are, here's a short how-to.

    Workaround for the bug for people who are comfortable tinkering:

    • Find or download the extension source code

    • Edit content.js, comment out the two lines that catch the play and pause event; we don't want the extension to meddle with those. It's these, just put two slashes in front of each:

      navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('play', function() {space(document)});
navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('pause', function() {space(document)});

    • Delete folder _metadata so chrome knows this is a modified extension, not a verified one

    • In chrome://extensions/, turn on developer mode, load unpacked extension, select the 0.0.1_0 folder to load it.

Mqrius
  • 111