Help
How LoopPoint works, what it does not do, and what to try when it is not behaving. If none of this covers it, email me.
Getting started
- Install it, then reload any YouTube tab you already had open — Chrome only runs an extension on pages loaded after it arrived.
- Open a video and press [ where the passage starts and ] where it ends. It begins looping straight away.
- Drag either marker on the scrubber to move it; the video follows so you can hear where you are landing.
- Press \ to pause and resume looping, and Shift+\ to clear it.
Keys
| [ | Set point A at the current frame |
| ] | Set point B at the current frame |
| \ | Turn looping on or off |
| Shift+\ | Clear the loop |
| Alt+L | Turn looping on or off from anywhere in Chrome |
Every one of these can be rebound on the options page, and none of them fire while
you are typing in a search box or a comment. Alt+L is a Chrome
shortcut rather than one of ours, so it is changed on Chrome's own
chrome://extensions/shortcuts page.
The controls on the player
The bar sits above the player's own controls. A and B show the two points; the arrows beside each nudge it a frame at a time, and the dot sets it to wherever the video is now. To the right: looping on or off, how many repeats before the video carries on by itself, playback speed, and ★ to save the loop under a name.
The toolbar button opens the same loop, plus the video's chapters and anything you have saved. Drag the bar by its left edge if it is covering something.
Questions
It does nothing on the video I have open
Reload the tab. Chrome injects an extension into pages that load after it is installed or updated, so a tab opened beforehand has no LoopPoint in it. This is also what to try after an update.
Does it work on Shorts, embedded videos, or YouTube Music?
It runs on ordinary watch pages — the ones whose address starts
youtube.com/watch. Shorts and embedded players on other sites are
not covered, because the extension asks Chrome for permission to run on watch
pages and nowhere else, and that narrower request is the one worth keeping.
Does it work on live streams?
No, and it says so rather than misbehaving: a stream that is still happening has no fixed end to loop back from. A stream that has finished and become an ordinary video works normally.
Where are my loops kept, and how many?
In your browser's own extension storage, on your machine. Up to 500 videos are remembered; past that the one you have not touched for longest is dropped. You can erase all of it from the options page, and removing the extension takes its storage with it.
Why does it want permissions?
Two, and only two. storage keeps your loops and settings on your own
machine. Access to youtube.com lets it run on watch pages. It cannot
see any other site, and there is no server for anything to be sent to — the
privacy policy is the long version.
Do I need an account? Does it cost anything?
No account, no sign-in, no e-mail address. It is free, with no ads and nothing to upgrade to.
Will it work in Edge, Brave, or another Chromium browser?
It very probably will — they run Chrome extensions — but I test on Chrome, so that is the only browser I can honestly say it works in. If you try it elsewhere, telling me how it went is genuinely useful.
How clean is the loop, really?
The gap at the seam measured a median of 17.5 ms over 78 consecutive laps at 360p, and 53.3 ms over 71 laps at 1080p, on a real YouTube page serving AV1. A frame at 30 fps lasts 33 ms, so the low figure is a cut shorter than one frame.
Those are numbers from one machine, one video and one connection. The cost is mostly decoding: a higher resolution or a busier machine widens the gap, a lower one narrows it. What does not vary is the direction — the cut lands before your end point rather than after it, so the loop never replays a fragment of what comes next.
The loop drifts or stops when an ad plays
It should survive an ad: the player swaps the video out and LoopPoint re-attaches when yours comes back. If a loop genuinely does not survive one, that is a bug I would like to hear about — the video's address and roughly what happened is enough to chase it.
Can I share a loop with someone?
Not yet. It is the next thing on the list, along with easing the speed back up between repeats. Shipped changes are all in the changelog.
Still stuck
Write to looppoint@circlom.com. A link to the video and what you expected to happen is usually enough to find it. Bugs get answered; so do feature requests, even the ones I end up saying no to.