getCurrentTime() for YouTube Video

Question

I\'m writing a Chrome Extension in Javascript and I want to get the current time for the playing video on youtube.com. I tried using the answer from question Getting Current You

Answer 1

As Ben correctly assumed, you're executing the code in the context of your background page, which is wrong.

To interact with other pages, you need to inject a content script in them. See overview of that here. You'll probably need to learn how Messaging works so you can gather data in a content script and communicate it to the background page.

To make a minimal example, you can have a file inject.js

// WARNING: This example is out of date
// For the current HTML5 player, see other answers' code snippets
ytplayer = document.getElementById("movie_player");
ytplayer.getCurrentTime();

And in your background page script, you can inject that into the current page as follows (when the button is clicked, for instance)

chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(function(tab) {
  chrome.tabs.executeScript({
    file: 'inject.js'
  });
});

Then, you'll see the result of the execution in the console of the currently open page. To report the result back, you'll need to use chrome.runtime.sendMessage

Answer 2

Use the following code works for chrome extension:

video = document.getElementsByClassName('video-stream')[0];
console.log(video);
console.log(video.currentTime);

Answer 3

you can only use getElementById when you´r referencing to the correct page. You´r using the right id. if you´r trying to access the play form another page you can use the jquery .load() function

---------EDIT----------

in the sample they do it like so: function getCurrentTime() { var currentTime = player.getCurrentTime(); return roundNumber(currentTime, 3); }

Answer 4

In 2020, it seems we should use: player.playerInfo.currentTime.

full code on codepen