u/Acceptable-Offer-541

Hey everyone, dropped a fairly big update to VidBar (the Chrome video toolbar). Figured I'd post a summary here since the changelog is a wall of text.

New features

• Reaction Timeline — shows a heat map on the progress bar so you can see where other viewers rewound or replayed. Good for long videos where you want to jump straight to the highlight.
• Sleep Timer — set a countdown (5–300 min) and the video auto-pauses or closes when it hits zero. Useful if you fall asleep to shows.
• Smart Speed — adaptive playback that nudges speed up during slow/silent sections and holds steady during fast speech. Different from silence skipper — it feels more natural on podcasts and interviews.
• Skip Segments — auto-jumps over sponsor reads, intros, outros, and filler. Brief undo button appears after each skip if you want to replay it.
• Audio-Only Mode — drops the video track entirely while keeping audio. Cuts bandwidth 50–80% per minute. Useful for YouTube podcasts and lectures when you don't need the screen.
• Caption Overlay — restyle subtitles on YouTube and Netflix: font, size, colour, position, outline. Saves per-site so it applies automatically.

Themes — now all free

All 30 themes (Dark, Light, Mono, Sakura, Gruvbox, Catppuccin Mocha, Dracula, Nord, etc.) are free with every install. No Pro needed.

One thing that might not be obvious: themes apply site-wide on YouTube, not just to the VidBar toolbar. So Cyberpunk or Dracula actually reskins the whole page.

Hotkeys

Every feature has a default shortcut and all of them are re-mappable from the Keys tab. VidBar also detects conflicts with site shortcuts so it doesn't stomp on YouTube's own key binds.

https://reddit.com/link/1t4491t/video/oknlpb2lq8zg1/player

I know installing random extensions is a big ask, so I set up a live "playground" on Glitch. You can see exactly how it interacts with a page without having to add it to Chrome first.

Live Demo: https://glitch.tamasvi.com/demo

I'm working on a Chrome extension and I've noticed that my rating is showing as 0. However, I can see that there are already a few reviews. Does anyone know why this might be happening? Is there some kind of moderation or processing delay?

there are ratings and reviews that I can see

here's the link if anyone can look up at it.

I watch a lot of video content, and I've always been annoyed by how locked-down and clunky default HTML5 video players are on most websites. You can't control the speed properly, the UI is terrible, and the experience changes wildly from site to site.

I spent the last few months digging into how to override these default players and standardize the experience across the web. It took a lot of trial and error with DOM manipulation and event listeners, but I finally got it working smoothly.

My team and I actually packaged this up into a tool called Glitch.

I know Reddit hates self-promo, so I’m not going to drop any links here and spam you guys. But I just wanted to share this milestone because it was a massive headache to solve. If anyone is curious about the tech stack or wants to test it out, just let me know in the comments and I can DM you or drop it below!