SpeedyPlay

A small Chrome extension that switches YouTube playback speed without digging through the player’s settings menu. Desktop YouTube only.

What it does

• Adds a speed-toggle button to the YouTube player controls, next to the built-in ones. Clicking it flips between normal speed and your chosen speed; the icon turns red while the video is sped up.
• Works on Shorts too, where it joins the like/dislike/comment/share column as a matching round button with the current speed underneath.
• Applies your chosen speed automatically to every new video, if you want it to. This is on by default and can be turned off in the popup.
• Has keyboard shortcuts: Alt+Shift+S opens the popup, Alt+Shift+A toggles, and Alt+Shift+. and Alt+Shift+, step by 0.25x, echoing the Shift+. and Shift+, YouTube uses for the same thing. All four are remappable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts, and the popup says so when Chrome has left one unassigned.
• Shows the new speed over the video whenever it changes, which is the only feedback available in fullscreen, where the controls are hidden.
• The popup reads the speed of the video in the tab you are on, and picking a speed there applies it straight away instead of waiting for the next toggle.
• Holds the speed while the player starts up. YouTube restores its own remembered rate a moment after the page loads, so the speed is re-applied for a few seconds and then left alone.
• Skips ads, so they keep playing at normal speed.
• Leaves a speed you set by hand alone: auto-apply only steps in when the video is still at 1×, and switching speed from the button stops it re-applying.

Speeds available: 0.5×, 0.75×, 1.25×, 1.5×, 1.75×, 2×, 2.5×, 3×.

It runs on www.youtube.com only — not YouTube Music, not the mobile site, and not videos embedded on other sites.

Install from source

1. Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode.
2. Click Load unpacked and select the src/ folder of this repository.

There is no build step — src/ is the extension.

Packaging for the Chrome Web Store

Zip the contents of src/ (the manifest must sit at the root of the archive):

cd src && zip -r ../speedyplay.zip . -x '.*' && cd ..

Layout

File	Purpose
src/manifest.json	Extension manifest (MV3)
src/speed.js	Speed validation and formatting, shared by the two below
src/content.js	Player button, Shorts button, auto-apply and the indicator
src/background.js	Service worker relaying the keyboard shortcuts
src/popup.html / .css / .js	Settings popup
assets/icon.svg	Vector master for the extension icon
assets/make-icons.py	Renders that master to src/icons/ and the store icon
assets/store-icon-128.png	Listing icon: 96x96 of artwork on a 128x128 canvas

Settings live in chrome.storage.local under selectedSpeed and autoApply. Stepping writes back to selectedSpeed, so the speed the button toggles to is always the last one used. The popup saves every change straight away, and the content script picks it up immediately — no page reload needed.

Keyboard shortcuts

There are two separate paths, because the browser one cannot be relied on.

On a YouTube page, the content script handles plain Alt itself: A toggles, S opens the popup, and , . or the arrow keys step by 0.25x. Nothing has to be reserved for this to work, it suppresses the default so Alt+Down no longer scrolls the page, and it stays out of the way while the caret is in a search or comment box. Keys are matched on event.code: with Alt held, macOS reports event.key as the character the combination would type, so Alt+S arrives as ß. Opening the popup goes through the service worker, since a page cannot open it directly.

The two sets are split on Shift deliberately. Plain Alt is the page’s, Alt+Shift is the browser’s. Without that split a single Alt+Shift+S would open the popup through the browser and toggle the speed in the page at once.

Anywhere in the browser, chrome.commands provides the same actions on Alt+Shift+S, Alt+Shift+A, Alt+Shift+. and Alt+Shift+,, which is what reaches a YouTube tab that is not focused. These only work if the browser agreed to reserve them, which is not a given: Chromium forks such as Arc take many combinations for their own interface, and one the browser declines is left unassigned in silence. The popup does not list them, since the page shortcuts always work and listing both said the same thing twice; it links to chrome://extensions/shortcuts instead.

Suggested shortcuts are applied when an extension is installed, not when it is reloaded, so editing them here does nothing to a copy already loaded; remove it and load it again, or assign them by hand at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

Permissions

• storage — remembers your chosen speed.
• *://*.youtube.com/* — the extension only runs on YouTube.

Nothing is collected or transmitted. See PRIVACY.md, published at https://maks-kyrychok.github.io/speed-play/PRIVACY.html.

History

Versions before 1.0.0 were built with Flutter Web. The popup was rewritten in plain HTML/CSS/JS, which dropped the packaged extension from ~34 MB to under 20 KB and made it open instantly. The Flutter implementation is still in the git history at the initial commit.

Icon

The icon is original artwork for this project, covered by the same licence as the code. assets/icon.svg is the master; python3 assets/make-icons.py renders the three PNG sizes the manifest declares plus the store listing icon, with no image libraries needed. The listing icon is padded to 96x96 of artwork inside a 128x128 canvas, which is what the store expects; the icons the manifest declares fill their canvas instead. It carries the same double chevron as the in-player button and the same red as the popup, so the extension reads as one thing wherever it shows up. make-icons.py keeps an indigo alternative next to the red, since a red tile with white arrows sits close to YouTube’s own look.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. This covers the icon as well.

This site is open source. Improve this page.