
YouTube adds Play icon to page titles so you can see which tabs are making noise - Lightning
http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/08/03/youtube-adds-play-icon-to-video-page-titles-so-you-can-quickly-see-which-tabs-are-making-noise/
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jaredsohn
Funny timing. I noticed this first after I updated Chrome and thought it was a
part of their new audio indicators feature which might have been a part of the
release.

While researching this I discovered that you can see audio indicators right
now (even in the stable release) by including "–enable-audible-notifications"
in the commandline when running the program.

~~~
jcampbell1
My understanding is that Chrome wants to roll out this feature, but there is
no way to know if various plugins, including flash, are playing audio. If they
show an indicator for only html5 A/V it will seem like a half-broken feature.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Chrome has its own "native" flash implementation, maintained by Google; no
reason they couldn't add a hook to notify the browser about audio playback.

~~~
keeperofdakeys
It isn't native, it's adobe flash player packaged with the browser. They have
no more ways of telling it is using audio than a normal plugin.

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citizenkeys
This is a simple javascript that adds a unicode "▶" to the beginning of html
page title. This can be easily coded using the youtube javascript api. Just
add the following code when the youtube playstate changes to
"YT.PlayerState.PLAYING".

The js basically looks like this: function onPlayerStateChange(event) { var
player = event.target; switch (event.data) { case YT.PlayerState.PLAYING:
document.title = '▶' \+ document.title; break; } }

~~~
jaredsohn
FYI, if you implement this code for real, you'll need to make sure the symbol
doesn't get repeated upon multiple plays and that it gets removed when not
playing.

Edit: This is two different bugs. It means that if you are not playing, it
will still look like it is playing and if you play multiple times, you will
see the symbol get duplicated.

Edit 2: Code should be like this:

var documentTitle = document.title; function onPlayerStateChange(event) { var
player = event.target; switch (event.data) { case YT.PlayerState.PLAYING:
document.title = '▶' \+ documentTitle; break; default: document.title =
documentTitle } }

but it assumes that the document title doesn't otherwise change.

~~~
citizenkeys
In practice, the youtube api has other cases in that switch expression (ENDED,
PAUSED, etc). For those, you would use the following in their case statement:
document.title = document.title.replace("\u25B6","");

And to revise my original code, this is what you could use in the PLAYING
statement to prevent multiple play symbols: document.title = "\u25B6" \+
document.title.replace("\u25B6","");

Notice, too, that I replaced the "▶" with the appropriate javascript encoding.

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tmrmn
Unfortunately it shows as playing by default, which is obviously not true if
you have ’Click to Play’ enabled in Chrome (load plugins on demand).

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rhizome
If YouTube didn't hire the best and the brightest they wouldn't how know to
copy Soundcloud.

~~~
kumarm
So YouTube shouldn't do it because soundcloud did it first. If they copied
soundcloud idea, I am really glad they did as a User.

~~~
iamshs
All he is saying is, it took them long to copy it.

~~~
thezilch
No, all he is saying is a snide remark about Google and its employees -- a
completely pointless comment.

~~~
rhizome
No, it's an illustration of how hiring the best and brightest doesn't get you
the cutting edge. If anything, hiring the best and brightest prevents those
people from creating competitors. _In the sense that I describe it_ , which is
the sense in that it apparently didn't occur to YT to indicate a playing tab
until now, Google et al are professional sandbaggers.

This feature is straight-up evidence that YT is behind the times. Rationalize
away the bureaucracy or inertia or whatever of a company that size all you
like, but fact is they're behind the times.

I bet they can write the shit out of a Quicksort on a whiteboard, though.

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w1ntermute
I feel like this should be part of the browser.

~~~
wfn
deadreturns2: fyi, you are shadowbanned (this means people won't see and won't
be able to reply to your comments). Not sure why.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I'm sure there's a reason for it, and that telling people they've been
hellbanned negates the whole purpose of said hellbanning.

~~~
unimpressive
If PG wants people to respect the Hellban, maybe he could append the reason
they were hellbanned to their posts. (Obviously visible only to onlookers.) As
it stands the process is opaque.

In the case of the commenter below, 100% of his comments are short, and of
them most are valueless or negatively valuable.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6073870)

A particularly poignant example.

~~~
artursapek
I think people who choose to show hellbanned users should just be quiet about
it.

~~~
arrrg
I think it’s morally wrong to not make people who post something (that is not
some sort of automated spam) that is just ignored aware of their situation.

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harrytuttle
To be honest I think a browser should shut the tab up if it isn't focussed and
when you switch to it there should be an unmute button.

There are so many pop-unders these days which start talking to you it's
unreal.

I'm not a victim of these regularly (thanks to adblock edge) but I know many
who are.

~~~
kevingadd
I don't think that will ever happen; lots of people use background tabs to
play music in something like Pandora or Play Music.

~~~
harrytuttle
They can hit unmute :)

I still use WinAmp. Perhaps I'm getting too old for this :)

~~~
kalleboo
> I still use WinAmp

How do you discover new music?

> Perhaps I'm getting too old for this

Aha, I see

~~~
ferongr
>How do you discover new music?

Not him but personally, I still discover music the same way I have for the
past 17 years. Music sites, conversation with fans of bands I like, magazines,
bandcamp (myspace in the old days), spontaneous purchases of 2nd hand CDs in
stores...

Personally, I find automatic recommendation services lacking both in
recommendation quality and diversity of things to recommend from.

~~~
Steko
"Discovering new music" is a massively overblown concept. I discover plenty of
new music without going out of my way to do it but if I was trapped on a
desert island with my current 40 some gb of music I'd probably be more than
content with that for a few decades.

~~~
barbs
I'd probably be content as well, but I think about some of my all-time
favourite songs, and how a lot of them were discovered by chance or through
some obscure means. And I wonder just how many more "all-time favourites" are
out there waiting to be discovered. That's what keeps me actively listening to
new music, and indeed, I have found some truly excellent music through music-
recommendation services (last.fm mostly).

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ChrisNorstrom
Couldn't this have already been done by dynamically changing the favicon using
javascript? Or did that not work with all browsers.

~~~
rhizome
No, it works, and other sites have been using this technique for quite a long
time. It just never made it into YT product until now.

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dsuriano
This is one thing I like about Safari. When you open a new tab it won't start
playing the video until you select it.

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LAMike
I saw this on Canary a few months ago its a pretty nifty feature

~~~
OMBUG
I'm curious as to why they took it out, it's a lifesaver when you have 50+
tabs and one of them has a talking ad.

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dep_b
I really don't know why I still have to suffer from unmutable Flash,
immediately starting music and videos without any possibility to have it to
shut up by default. Just ask me:

This page wants to play audio, would you like to hear it? Yes / No [V]
Remember for the next times

The funny thing is that soundcloud and youtube behave very well in this
respect. Apparently the biggest audio sites (just look at the amount of music
on youtube!) don't need to start blasting without any user interaction.

~~~
jsmeaton
Click-to-play plugins in browser settings not enough?

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speeder
I wish there was a way to track who is making noise INSIDE a page.

I have two issues, one is some news websites that autoplay videos on random
parts of the page.

The other, more annoying, is video websites (for example to watch fansubbed
anime) that have ads that the ad author (not the side) somehow hidden it...
Once I even found it, opening the inspector and looking around, but sometimes
a page is ridicously complex that it is easy to just close it, and find
another site.

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netmute
How about not autoplaying the video as soon as I open the page? I frequently
open multiple pages in background tabs and Youtube makes this rather annoying.

~~~
spyder
Or it should play only when you switch to the tab.

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iamshs
This is a welcome change. But now my youtube history URLs in awesome bar of FF
all have the unicode character of the "play" sign. Can there be a more elegant
implementation, and even click to play plugin won't have any effect as this
poster notes [1].

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153349)

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guidopallemans
why don't they just change the red and white play-icon to a pause icon?

~~~
raldi
Changing the title also helps people who open everything in new windows.

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frncscgmz
I'm a little disappointed. When I noticed the play icon on the tab I rejoiced
and thought that was an actual control for pausing/resuming on the tab.

Sadly that wasn't the case.

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mbesto
Hypem has had this feature for a long time now! Very cool:

[http://hypem.com/](http://hypem.com/)

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mkartic
I wish they'd fix the buffering issues.

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tbirdz
How long until "Method for adding an indicator to show if a web page is
playing audio" is patented?

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ndesaulniers
I just noticed this watching Carmack's Quake Con talks!

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bichiliad
THANK. GOD.

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mmhd
Soundcloud has done this from the beginning. Nothing new here, move along.

~~~
hamburglar
Bandcamp does it too (Soundcloud did it first, though), but it's still nice to
see it catching on.

