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Is there a Google Chrome extension that would allow a YouTube video to load and play the audio while showing a black screen over the video?

My OS is Windows 10 if that matters.

My motivation for doing this is to be able to play music in the background while studying, without being distracted by whatever stock video footage the youtube videos want to display.

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  • Do you mean music playing in the browser (eg. through spotify web)? Or music running on the desktop? If so, the OS may be important here. And by block do you mean stop loading the page? Or just don't play the video (but load the page)?
    – ᔕᖺᘎᕊ
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 20:37
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    I will edit to try to be clearer.
    – Eliyahu
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 20:38
  • Ahh - so you want to listen to the video, but not see it?
    – ᔕᖺᘎᕊ
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 20:49
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    Yes! Exactly, I want to listen to the video but not see it.
    – Eliyahu
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 20:56
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    With the way YouTube works now, that'd be pretty annoying, because you'd have to move the controls out of the video, put a black box between the video and controls, or hide the whole video and put in your own controls -- none of which are particularly simple.
    – anon
    Commented Dec 2, 2015 at 19:53

3 Answers 3

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You can use a userscript. Userscripts are small JavaScript scripts that run in your browser. They allow you to customize sites and edit their design or even add functionality, and they can be as easy or as hard as you want them to be!

I've made a simple userscript that will move the video so that the controls can still be accessed, but the video can't really be seen.

Usage

It's really easy to install!

  1. Install the Chrome Tampermonkey extension. This is a userscript manager -- it makes life much easier and manages the installation of and usage of userscripts.
  2. Install the script. Clicking that link will open it in Tampermonkey, prompting you to install. Click 'install', and you're done!

You can now go to a YouTube video, and see it work :)

example

Code for reference (you only need to click the link above to install it :)

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Youtube Video hider (to only listen to audio)
// @namespace    http://stackexchange.com/users/4337810/
// @version      1.0
// @description  A userscript that hides most of the video content on youtube, so you can listen rather than watch!
// @author       ᔕᖺᘎᕊ (http://stackexchange.com/users/4337810/)
// @match        *://*.youtube.com/*
// @run-at       document-end
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

window.onload = function() {
    document.getElementById('player-api').style.height = '50px';
};

Change log

v1.1: edited to use window.onload as per @QPaysTaxes' suggestion :)

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    Awesome! Glad my suggestions could help.
    – anon
    Commented Dec 6, 2015 at 21:02
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I made an extension for that. In my case I needed it to hide the videos in my workplace, since every house music video has half naked woman.

Here it is: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-video-hider/bppihnfgnlpklmhaojomngahgfpmpnbi

If you have any suggestions just leave it below, I will be happy to hear. The code is open source and you can check it out here, and contribute if you want: https://github.com/diogoperes/youtube-video-hider-app

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There is a new Chrome extension - Music Mode for Youtube - that do exactly what you want, blocks the video and keeps only the audio on Youtube. Plus, it has many additional features but you can disable them and keep only the feature that blocks the video keeping only the audio.

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