Timeline Peek documentation

Requirements

• Chrome 116 or newer, or another Chromium-based browser of the same version such as Edge, Brave or Opera.
• Until the extension is listed, it is installed from its folder: open the browser's extensions page, turn on Developer mode, choose Load unpacked and select the folder that contains manifest.json.

Previewing a moment

• Point at a video's timeline. A thumbnail of that moment appears above it, with the time.
• The first thumbnail of a video can take a moment while its copy loads; later ones are faster, and ones already seen are instant.
• On a player with no timeline, hold Shift and move across the video: the left edge is the start and the right edge is the end.

Saving a frame

• Click the camera button in the top-right corner of the video, or press Alt+Shift+S, to save the current frame.
• Press Alt+Shift+S while a preview is showing to save the previewed frame instead.
• Files are saved to a Timeline Peek folder in the browser's download folder, named after the page title and the moment, for example: Sunset over the ridge [00-00-42.000].png.
• The shortcut can be changed on the browser's keyboard shortcuts page for extensions.

Settings

The toolbar button opens the settings: the extension on or off, previews on or off for the current site, the preview size, PNG or JPEG, whether to also copy each frame to the clipboard, whether to ask where to save each file, the Shift preview and the camera button.

Limits you should know

• DRM-protected video cannot be previewed or captured; captures of it come out black.
• For streams that are neither a plain file nor HLS, such as DASH, previews exist only for the parts that have played.
• When a site does not allow the video's pixels to be read, a capture is cut out of a screenshot of the tab instead, and includes anything the player draws over the video.
• Live streams get no previews.