A Chrome extension to allow the addition of synchronized additive content to online videos.
- Clone this repository.
- Open a Chromium browser (Chrome, Chromium, modern Edge...).
- Go to your Extensions page.
- Make sure Developer Mode is enabled.
- Click the "Load unpacked" button.
- Select [repo root]/src/addeo as the unpacked extension folder to load.
- Ensure the Addeo extension is working with a test video. If the Addeo extension is working properly, you should see the video with a synchronized picture-in-picture addeo in the top left.
Addeo is a Chrome extension to allow online videos to be augmented with third-party content distributed separately. We've coined the term addeo (a portmanteau of addition and video) to refer to this new type of medium. Canonically, we can rephrase the first sentence of this paragraph to say that Addeo is a Chrome extension which allows online videos to be augmented with addeos.
An addeo, more formally, is any kind of content which is not part of a certain video but for which said video is part of the intended context. For example, suppose a film studio produces a film and distributes it the on Internet, but does not include Minbari subtitles. Minbari Ambassador Delenn watches this film, loves it, and wants to share it with her people, so she independently commissions the creation of Minbari subtitles. These subtitles are not part of the film or of the core suite of offerings distributed with it, but they are nonetheless intended to be consumed in the context of the film. Thus, these subtitles are an addeo.
At present (January 2021), distributing an addeo is not a simple or well-supported activity. Continuing with the example of Ambassador Delenn, if she wants to share these subtitles with her people, she has no good options and only a few bad ones: she could provide them as a transcript that Minbari viewers will have to read on their own, or she could create a separate video with just the subtitles that viewers will have to watch alongside the film, looking back and forth and manually synchronizing the times. Ideally, she would like to just be able to put her subtitles over the film in just the same way any other subtitles are overlaid, but because she does not own the film, she cannot simply duplicate it and put her subtitles on there.
This is the problem that the Addeo extension is intended to solve. Addeo is able to take independent, separately-distributed content and synchronize it at display time so that it can be viewed in proper context of the video for which it was created. Ambassador Delenn can simply format her subtitles as an addeo that the extension can understand, then instruct viewers to install the Addeo extension on the browser in which they want to watch the film. Viewers will then be able to watch the film on its original, intended viewing site, and the addeo subtitles will be automatically synchronized and displayed on top of the video much as subtitles provided by the film's creators would be.
It's worth noting that subtitles are not the only kind of content that can be distributed as an addeo; almost anything that adds onto a video can be done this way.
- Subtitles
- Dubs
- Accessibility features (high-contrast overlay, descriptive narration for the blind, etc.)
- Commentary (watch-along critique, reaction videos, educational explanations, etc.)
- Alternative soundtracks
- ...
A more in-depth discussion of the motivation behind this project can be found here.
This repository is made available under the terms of the MIT License.
Exceptions to this include the logo and icon assets, which are governed by the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as described in the assets License file. (NOTE: This more restrictive license for logo and icons was chosen as a default, because I do not know of a legitimate reason someone would want to modify and redistribute a logo or icon. If you have a reason you would like this asset license changed, please open a GitHub issue and I'll be happy to discuss it.)