parkeraddison / watch-on-nebula

Browser extension which prompts you to watch YouTube videos on Nebula instead

---

⚠ Development on this extension is paused, go check out the work being done over at cpiber/NebulaEnhance :)

---

'Watch on Nebula' extension

"I'm still discovering that some of my favorite youtubers are on nebula."

Same! And I'd like to support them over there.

What is this?

A Firefox- and Chrome-compatible extension that will prompt you to watch videos on Nebula when possible.

Whenever you load a YouTube video, this extension will check if the creator is part of Nebula, and if so will prompt you with a link to watch their content over at Nebula instead.

How to use

Simply add the extension from the official site corresponding to your browser.

• Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/watch-on-nebula/
• Chrome: [link - todo]

That's it!

Why is this important?

If you're subscribed to Nebula, your watch time is what directly supports your favorite creators. By watching the video on the Nebula platform you contribute to the share of profit that creator makes.

You might also discover that a creator you love on YouTube has some exclusive videos on Nebula you were missing out on since you didn't realize they were even on Nebula!

Screenshots

When you're on a YouTube video where the channel is also on Nebula, this popup will show up:

Clicking the "Watch on Nebula" button will bring you to a search page on Nebula:

Credits

The concept for this extension was wholly inspired by this post by u/duckduckohno, and the implementation was sparked by this post by u/KevineCove on the r/watchnebula subreddit.

Contributing

You can help out by contributing ideas or even developing parts of the code yourself.

Ideas/Suggestions

Any feature requests or ideas for modifications and/or bug fixes? Post an issue! I'd greatly appreciate it.

Developing

If you're using Firefox to develop, you can clone this repository then run npm install from a terminal in the root directory. From there, you can run npm run start to create a Firefox instance with the extension installed.

watch-on-nebula's Issues

Chrome support

Hi! I'm the creator of https://github.com/cpiber/NebulaEnhance, and recently I've received a request to basically provide the functionality you do, since you don't have Chrome support (cpiber/NebulaEnhance#7).

In light of this I first wanted to ask if you plan on adding support. My extension is available in both browsers, so simply implementing it would mean stealing your extension's content.

`creatorData` is an array of empty objects

standard.tv might have changed their site, your extension doesn't work anymore.
The only element that has a meaningful dataset is the .youtube-creator itself, and it only has a video property (the channel id). There is no more title.

Possible solution is to change lines 17-19 in background_script.js to:

        let creatorData = Array.from(creators).map(d => {
            return {
                video: d.dataset.video,
                title: d.querySelector('a').innerText
            }
        });

Search page doesn't consistently find the video

Problem

Currently, when we click 'Watch on Nebula' it brings us to a Nebula search page and queries the video title. Unfortunately, search queries submitted to Nebula don't consistently find the target video. This is due to a number of reasons:

1. Differences between video titles on YouTube and Nebula
2. Videos that are only on YouTube (e.g. #shorts)
3. Inconsistent behavior when querying the creator name

Examples

1. Creators may choose a different YouTube title, or change them frequently after posting, resulting in a mismatch
   Nebula
   
   YouTube
   

2. Some videos (I've noticed a trend with #shorts) are only for YouTube
   Nebula
   
   YouTube
   

3. In some cases, including the creator name in a search term causes zero results! Other times it works fine.
   Without
   
   With (broken)
   
   With (working)
   

Solutions

This is an open issue that accepts any potential solutions, please post if you have an idea!

Possible ideas:

• Search for the creator name plus a keyword from the video title
  • Could utilize a general term importance dataset to just pull out the most important words
  • Is still affected by the creator name issue (e.g. querying "Real Engineering Hydrogen" shows zero results!)
    
• Just link to the creator's Nebula page and let the user find the video
  • Great for new videos
  • Annoying for old videos
• Query by creator and date-range (+- a few days from the YouTube publish date)
  • Not supported by Nebula... (hopefully it will be!)
  • Probably somewhat robust

What do you think?