CyTube Plus

A Firefox and Chrome add-on for cytu.be: a tidier look, coloured names, mention highlights, lights down, Niconico-style comments over the video, click a name to reply or an emote to post it, and a switch to turn off sync and watch on your own. Unofficial.

Get it: Firefox Add-ons (Firefox and Firefox for Android) · Chrome Web Store (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera)

Screenshots

Features

• Polished look: the video, the buttons under it, the playlist, the poll and the chat become rounded, tidier cards, with quieter timestamps, the playing item marked in the playlist and poll results shown as bars. A long chat message wraps in its own column beside the time and name, so its second line starts under its first word, not under the time (on a chat wide enough for it). The rest of the page is left alone. It also makes the chat, private messages and long playlists less work for the browser to draw, which you can't see but helps busy channels run smoothly.
• Coloured names: each name in chat gets its own colour.
• Highlights: messages that mention you, and private messages, stand out. CyTube's own PM windows work as usual.
• Lights down: the bulb button under the video dims the rest of the page (90% by default). Click outside the video to lift the dark for a few seconds. How dark it goes and how long it lifts for (or whether it lifts at all) can be changed in the toolbar popup. With Dim the chat separately on, the chat gets a lighter dark of its own (40% by default, adjustable) that stays put, so it's always readable. The rest of the page then lifts only for a click outside both the video and the chat, not while you type. The chat's header is dimmed with the page.
• Niconico comments: the square button under the video makes new chat messages fly across it, emotes included, and coloured text like greentext keeps its colour. They show in fullscreen too, and their speed can be changed in the toolbar popup (half to double). With Emotes only on, just the emotes fly, and messages without one stay in chat. Nothing is saved up while the tab is hidden: only what's said while you're watching flies.
• Click names and emotes: click a name in chat to reply to that person, or an emote to add it to your message. An emote shown with one of the channel's effects (a flip, a spin, one emote laid over another) comes with the effect, as it was typed, so yours looks the same. Nothing is sent until you press Enter.
• Shrink big emotes: big emotes in chat are made smaller so the chat reads more easily: at most 36px tall inside a message, and 84px when a message is only emotes. Emotes smaller than that stay as CyTube (or the channel) shows them: none ever gets bigger.
• Turn off sync (in the toolbar popup, off to start with): the video is yours to pause and skip around as you like. Click a title in the playlist, or in search results, and it plays just for you, from the start; when it ends, the next one down plays, until the end of that list. What you're watching is marked in amber in the list (the room's video keeps its own mark), and the mark moves down as each one ends, with the list scrolling along if you were watching it. The room carries on without you, and a bar under the video says what you're watching and what the room's on. If the channel hides its playlist, a Playlist button on the bar opens a searchable list of it to pick from instead. Back in sync on the bar takes you straight back to the room's video, where the room is, and turns the setting off again. Ctrl+click or a middle click still opens a title's link in a new tab. The playlist leader stays in sync, as the room follows their video.
• Blacklist: the add-on does nothing at all on blacklisted channels. The Kinoplex is blacklisted to start with. Channels can be added or removed in the toolbar popup, which also has a switch for the channel you're on.

All the settings are in the toolbar button's popup.

What's changed in each version is on the Releases page.

Staying out of the channel's way

• A channel's own CSS always wins over the Polished look. (Coloured names go over the channel's on purpose, and emote sizes can make a channel's big emotes smaller, never bigger; both can be switched off.)
• None of CyTube's code is changed, and the add-on's buttons sit in a group of their own, so a channel's scripts find the page as they expect. The one exception is while sync is off: the two handlers that move the video along with the room are wrapped, and they're put back as soon as you're in sync again.
• If a channel's script already does something when a name is clicked, or colours a name itself, the add-on leaves that alone.

Installing on Firefox

From Firefox Add-ons (recommended: it updates itself)

Open the CyTube Plus page on Firefox Add-ons in Firefox and click Add to Firefox. On Android, open the same page in Firefox for Android and tap Add to Firefox.

From GitHub

1. Download the .xpi file from the latest release on the Releases page.
2. In Firefox, open about:addons, click the gear button and choose Install Add-on From File…, then pick the .xpi. (Or drag the file onto a Firefox window.)
3. Click Add when Firefox asks.

To get updates automatically, install it from Firefox Add-ons instead.

Needs Firefox 140 or newer (desktop) or 142 (Android).

Installing on Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera

From the Chrome Web Store (it updates itself)

Open the CyTube Plus page on the Chrome Web Store and click Add to Chrome. Edge, Brave and Opera install it from the same page (Edge and Opera may ask you to allow extensions from other stores first).

Loaded it from a GitHub zip before it was on the store? Remove that copy on the extensions page (chrome://extensions) so you don't have two.

Needs Chrome 120 or newer, or a browser built on it.

Once it's installed

Open any cytu.be channel. If the buttons don't appear, open the add-on's menu in the toolbar's extensions panel and check it's allowed on cytu.be.

Installing from the source code

This loads the add-on straight from this repository, without Mozilla's signing. Firefox removes it again when it closes, so it has to be loaded again each time Firefox starts.

1. On this repository's page, click Code → Download ZIP, and extract the zip.
2. In Firefox, open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox.
3. Click Load Temporary Add-on… and pick manifest.json in the extracted folder.

On Chrome, install it from the Chrome Web Store. To load the source code there instead: the repository's manifest.json is Firefox's, so rename manifest.chrome.json to manifest.json (replacing it), turn on Developer mode on chrome://extensions, click Load unpacked and pick the folder.