SpoilerFree

Ever had the ending to your fave show ended by The Algorithm™? Not anymore.
Watching a new show on Netflix? We'll add that to your list.
Still catching up on the MCU? This is how your search would look before.
And how it would look now.

Inspiration

It's been way too common for movies or shows we watch to end up being spoiled just because one channel on your Youtube recommended decided to make a clickbait-y video with a thumbnail of the biggest (upcoming) twist in your show. Not anymore.

What it does

It allows you to compile a list of shows you watch, either automagically from Netflix or manually with a lookup. When a page then loads, the extension finds videos which have content related to any of the shows on your list and blocks them, both replacing the image with a warning and the title with a blank.

If you're weary about a certain video link, by right-clicking the video you can use the special lookup to have the extension check the first 30 seconds of the video's captions and the description for any spoilers.

How we built it

We implemented it using a Google Chrome Extension and used nearly exclusively Javascript for this.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult working mostly online, so we had to work through communication issues along with our programming issues. Some of the biggest problems we ran into were getting the Youtube video thumbnails to be censored (even while scrolling) and getting the extension to detect which movie/show is being played on Netflix. The most difficult challenge we had was getting our content script that was censoring the Youtube videos to communicate with our background script that held all the information about what to censor.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We completed the project, and the user interface is clean and simple. The UI elements are well implemented and are self-explanatory.

What we learned

Why Content Scripts and Background scripts are very different.

What's next for SpoilerFree

Remove a few bugs, add functionality for other sites (like Instagram, Reddit, etc.) as well as prompts for Amazon Prime and Hulu too. Also, adding the functionality to implement books and comics into the filter would be a way to expand it.

Try it out:

Visit the GitHub repository here, instructions on installation are in the readme.md.

Built With

Submitted to

BoilerMake VIII

Created by

I worked on the code to manually add movies. I also made the dropdown, as well as created persistent storage for the list of movies. Javascript, and in particular the constraints of chrome extensions was an interesting, but exhausting too.

Aryan Wadhwani
I worked on the back-end, creating the API endpoints that the extension would use. This included using Google Cloud's Compute Engine to serve a way to transcribe a YouTube video, by using YouTube-DL and GCP's Speech-to-Text API.

Oliver Miller
I worked on the code that detected the spoilers on the YouTube page and blocked them. There were many challenges but I learned a lot about javascript in the process.

meghnakr
I primarily worked on the part that detected when a user is on Netflix and what show/movie they are watching, which then prompts the user and adds it to the dropdown if desired.

Kade Boltjes

Updates

Aryan Wadhwani started this project — Jan 24, 2021 09:08 AM EST

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