A chrome browser extension for controlling access to YouTube by whitelisting specific videos, channels or playlists with optional timeouts. Intended for use by parents.
Once the extension is installed when you browse to YouTube, you will be prompted to set up a password. After this, access to viewing videos on YouTube will be require entering the password. Access can be granted to a specific video, playlist, channel or all videos. This access may be indefinite or for a specific amount of time.
Repeated password guessing is prevented with a timeout.
The password can be reset from the extension settings. "allow records" that grant access to specific videos, channels and playlists can also be deleted from the extension settings.
Download and extract a release or checkout this repository and build using npm run build.
In Google Chrome, in the settings, under extensions, turn on "developer mode" from the toggle button on the top-right.
Restart Google chrome.
In Google Chrome, in the settings, under extensions, click "load unpacked" and navigate to the "dist" directory of the repository or the directory of the extracted release.
Make sure this extension is enabled and navigate to youtube.com then set up a password.
In order to prevent your child from disabling this extension, you should use google chrome browser policies. There is more than one way to do this. There are specific policies for forcing a specific extension to be used, however I do not use this and instead just prevent access to the settings pages that would allow disabling the extension.
For example, in Linux /etc/opt/chrome/policies/50-block-list.json
{
"URLBlockList":
[ "chrome://settings"
, "chrome://extensions"
, "chrome-extension://*"
]
}Note that disabling these URLs cannot be done (so far as I can tell) remotely by FamilyLink.
Improve the options page
More reliable behaviour on shorts page
options to exclude shorts when allowing videos
Possibly rewrite with better architecture, triggered by video elements playing rather than page mutations