Audio Only Youtube (Chrome Extension)

audio-only-youtube chrome extension enables you to disable the video on YouTube songs to save bandwidth when you just want to listen to audio.

Note: It doesn't support YouTube live videos.

How to Use

1. Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
2. 📌 Pin the extension to your toolbar by opening the Extensions menu (the puzzle piece icon) and clicking the pin next to "Audio Only Youtube".
3. Navigate to any YouTube video; the extension will automatically enable audio-only mode for videos.
4. Toggle audio-only mode by clicking the extension icon:
   • If you click it when audio-only mode is ON, the icon turns Grayscale, and the page refreshes so you can watch the video normally.
   • Clicking it again toggles it from Grayscale to Chromatic and reactivates audio-only mode.

Contribute

1. After cloning the repo, run yarn run dev.
2. Open Chrome, go to the Extensions tab, click Load unpacked, and select the build/chrome-mv3-dev directory.
3. Play a YouTube video and see the extension in action.

Thanks to Stefan Ivic for all the icons used in the extension.

Extension Internals

We obtain audio-only URLs by using signature decryption logic adapted from the @distube/ytdl-core library; however, because this library requires numerous Node-specific modules not available in standard browser environments, we have embedded and adapted the relevant code in js/ytdl. This approach lets us decrypt YouTube's signature parameters, fetch audio-only streams, and replace the default video stream to save bandwidth. As YouTube's signature generation logic can change, we must keep sig.js in sync with updates from @distube/ytdl-core to maintain functionality.

This extension is built using the Plasmo Framework, a powerful toolkit for building browser extensions.

Good luck!