Audio
Experimental - This feature aims to incorporate audio muting for supported video streaming websites. This feature is only as good as the subtitles associated with the videos, and requires them to be turned on. I encourage you to test it on a per-video basis before relying on it. It may work well on one video, and fail completely on another, even on the same site. Word misspelling, omitted words, and timing issues are all quite common with subtitles, and can cause the filter to fail to mute at the appropriate time. When the filter works, its pretty awesome, if I do say so myself, but when it fails it can be frustrating. In my personal testing, I have found it to be very helpful overall, and hopefully you will too!
A quick way to do an initial test of a video is to identify an easy-to-find section/subtitle, temporarily add a word from it to the filter, and then refresh the page. That will ensure that the filter can work on the video, and will probably help confirm the overall timing between the subtitles and the audio will work.
- Enable the feature
- Go to a supported site (see below)
- Turn on subtitles/closed captions
- Test subtitle timing (see Introduction)
- Enjoy!
The only way to use this on a TV is to connect a device with the extension installed in a supported browser, and have the video play in the browser. Casting is not supported.
Here you can choose the mute method that works best for you and your browser. Most browsers support muting of a tab, but some, like Firefox Mobile, don't support it right now. To work around that, you can choose to mute the video volume instead of the tab:
- Browser Tab: Mute/Unmute the browser's tab when necessary
- Video Volume: When muting, sets the video's volume to 0, and then back to the previous volume when unmuting
You can adjust when the subtitles will be hidden/shown, but its recommended that you at least show the filtered subtitles so when a section of dialogue is muted you will still be able to understand the dialogue without having to deal with the profanity.
- Show all subtitles (default)
- Show only filtered subtitles (recommended)
- Show only unfiltered subtitles
- Hide all subtitles
YouTube Minimum Muting: Set a minimum amount of time (in seconds) that the filter will mute matched words in a YouTube video using auto-generated subtitles. (The default is 0)
For now, I don't plan on splitting this out into a different extension, but that may change in the future. If you do want to have a different configuration for when you are browsing the internet and watching videos, for now the best way would probably be to use a different browser for watching videos. If you are a chrome user, you could look into Chrome Canary, or if you are a Firefox user take a look at Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition.
- Some websites, such as YouTube, don't load the subtitles if the tab is not active/visible. If you want to play it in the background, you can drag the tab into its own window, and make sure not to minimize it.
- Some websites, such as Plex.tv, resize their subtitles when moving the mouse in their tab to make room for their controls. This can interfere with the filter, and is even more likely to happen when some subtitles are being hidden (see Configuration section above).
I know that there are countless sites out there that offer video-streaming, but unfortunately I am not able to support them all. I will do what I can, so feel free to request a new site here, but please remember that I'm just doing this in my spare time.
This extension takes quite a bit of time to maintain, and adding new features like this audio muting is no exception. If you have found this extension helpful, or are interested in supporting it, donations are appreciated. When leaving a donation, feel free to leave me a note as to why you are donating.