YouTube Ultimate Tools

Downloads, ambient lighting, comment translation and 20+ toggles — for YouTube and YouTube Music, with separate settings for each.

Install from Greasy Fork →

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_{Ambilight sampling the picture, the injected toolbar, and the frosted queue panel — the same script on both sites.}

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Install

You need a userscript manager, then the script.

Manager	Chrome	Firefox
Tampermonkey (recommended)	add	add
Violentmonkey	add	add

Then refresh a YouTube tab you already have open — a brand-new tab is fine too, but the gear button only appears once the page finishes loading.

	Where the gear button appears
youtube.com	Top-right of the page header, immediately left of the Create button
music.youtube.com	Top-right of the page, immediately left of the Cast button

Before you start

Three things catch people out on their first run. All three are fixed further down.

1. Turn on hardware acceleration if you want Ambilight or the wave visualiser. Check chrome://gpu — see below.
2. Allowlist the download servers in your adblocker, or downloads fail.
3. Downloads are proxied through third-party servers. The script asks savenow.to / lbserver.xyz / dubs.io for a direct file link and pulls the FFmpeg core from cdn.jsdelivr.net. Your video request goes through those servers, not straight to YouTube. Settings, bookmarks and history stay in your browser.

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What you get

Downloading

	Formats	Notes
Video	144p–1080p MP4 · 1440p 2160p 4320p WEBM	Above 1080p is WEBM only
Audio	FLAC WAV WEBM (lossless) · MP3 M4A AAC OPUS OGG (lossy)	Lossless is labelled UHQ in the menu

Files are tagged in-browser — title, artist, album and cover art go straight into the file (ID3v2 for MP3, Vorbis Comments for FLAC) before it downloads.

Settings

Everything lives in the General tab. Anything not marked (on) is off by default.

_{Rebuilt from the script's own markup and stylesheet.}

Appearance	Playback	Community
Active Themes	Nonstop playback (on)	Show Dislikes (on)
Ambilight	Audio-only mode	Like vs Dislike bar
Cinematic Mode	Audio-only this tab	Translate comments
Royal Purple Timeline	Reverse mode	Download avatars
Wave visualizer Beta (on)	Disable Autoplay	Bookmarks (timestamps)
Shorts: show channel name	Disable Subtitles	Save Mix as playlist
UI style	Disable Annotations	Continue watching
	Hide Comments
	Hide Sidebar

Five more controls sit below the grid: UI style, Effect wave visualizer, Default video player quality, Language for translate comments (12 languages) and Video Player Size with a Reset button.

Three labels read Disable something. Those are the real menu labels — they mean "turn this YouTube behaviour off", not "stop disabling it".

Interface style

Settings → General → UI style. YouTube and YouTube Music remember the choice separately, so the two sites can look different at the same time.

Style	What you see
Standard	Nothing is overridden. Header, search box and panels stay exactly as YouTube built them.
Blur	Light frosted glass on the watch playlist panel and the YT Music queue panel.
Liquid Glass	Heavier glass — more blur, more saturation, plus a soft gradient on the playlist panel.
Transparent	No tint, no blur. Offered on youtube.com only.

Colours and background image live on the Themes tab:

Player buttons

The script also adds its own row of buttons — and the two sites do not get the same set.

_{Left: youtube.com, 8 buttons. Right: music.youtube.com, 6.}

youtube.com	music.youtube.com
Image video	Image video
Repeat video	MP4
Add bookmark	MP3
Show bookmarks	Close
History	Picture to picture
MP4 / MP3 download	Screenshot video
Picture to picture
Screenshot video

Repeat video and the bookmark/history buttons are guarded by if (!isYTMusic), so they are never built on YouTube Music.

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Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause
No gear button after installing	Tab not refreshed, or the manager has not granted access
Network Error while downloading	Adblocker eating the API
Settings open but changes do nothing	Preferences did not finish loading
Effects stutter, CPU at 100%	No hardware acceleration
"Save Mix as playlist" missing	Wrong site, or signed out

Found something else? Open an issue →

No gear button after installing

1. Refresh the tab you were already on. A page open before you installed keeps running the old version until you reload.
2. Check the manager granted permission. Click the Tampermonkey icon → this script → allow access to youtube.com and music.youtube.com.
3. Confirm the script is enabled — the Tampermonkey dashboard shows a toggle per script.
4. Check the page. Shorts, watch pages and YouTube Music work; embedded players and most youtube.com sub-pages do not carry the script's UI.

Network Error during downloads

Add these to uBlock Origin → Dashboard → My filters, at the very bottom:

@@||savenow.to^
@@||lbserver.xyz^
@@||dubs.io^
@@||cdn.jsdelivr.net^

@@ means "do not block". dubs.io is the fallback provider; cdn.jsdelivr.net serves the FFmpeg core used to convert and tag files — both are required even when the primary provider works.

The last rule unblocks a whole CDN. To keep it narrow, leave it out first and only add it if a conversion or tagging step fails.

Still failing? Open DevTools (F12) → Console and retry. The script logs SaveNow provider did not return success/progress_url or All SaveNow providers failed, which names the host that actually failed.

Settings do not apply

A timeout can fire before preferences finish loading on a slow connection. Refresh the page — that fixes it most of the time.

Otherwise, in the DevTools console:

GM_deleteValue('ytSettingsMDCM');

⚠️ This wipes every stored setting. Copy it out first if you want to restore it: copy(GM_getValue('ytSettingsMDCM'))

Ambilight needs hardware acceleration

Without it the browser falls back to software rendering (SwiftShader), the WebGL shader runs on the CPU, and the effect stutters. This matters most on laptops with integrated graphics.

Check chrome://gpu → WebGL row:

• Hardware accelerated → fine
• SwiftShader or Software only → this is your problem

Enable it at chrome://settings/system → Use graphics acceleration when available → restart the browser. A tab refresh is not enough. Ambilight, the wave visualiser and the YT Music ambient glow all depend on this.

"Save Mix as playlist" does not appear

The button only shows on a Mix, and only on the regular YouTube site. A Mix is any page whose list parameter starts with RD; in the examples below <token> stands for any characters:

list=RDMM                      unnamed mix
list=RDMM<token>               named mix (Mixes tab)
list=RD<videoId>&start_radio=1 mix seeded from a single video

Check the console for a line starting with [YT Tools] mixPlaylist — it prints whether the feature is enabled and which list id was found.

Creating the playlist uses an internal YouTube endpoint that needs you signed in. Signed out, the request returns 401.

The script declares @connect * because the final file URL is returned by the API at runtime, so the full set of possible hosts cannot be listed up front.

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Building from source

Node.js 18 or newer (tested on 24.x). One dependency: fs-extra.

git clone https://github.com/akari310/youtube-tools.git
cd youtube-tools
npm install
npm run build      # → youtube-tools.user.js at the repo root

Layout and build order

16 modules across 5 directories, concatenated into one IIFE — not imported.

Directory	Files	Contents
src/core/	3	Userscript header, shared bootstrap and DOM helpers, DOM/security policy
src/ui/	5	Glass components, shared DOM helpers, styles, settings menu, injected buttons
src/features/	3	WebGL Ambilight, Cinema mode, Mix → playlist
src/main/	3	DOM observers, feature manager, bootstrap
src/utils/	2	Downloader/API wrappers, URL-and-settings module

Placement gotcha: the downloader lives in src/utils/, not src/features/. The wave visualiser and dislike counter also sit outside src/features/.

scripts/build.js concatenates using an explicit FILE_ORDER array — not alphabetical, not filesystem order. Declaration order is execution order, so a module in the wrong slot can break the whole bundle. core/meta.js first, core/init.js next (it opens the IIFE), main/final.js last (it runs the bootstrap).

Commands

Command	Effect
npm run build	Concatenate src/ into youtube-tools.user.js
npm run bump	Bump the version across every location it appears
npm run release	Bump, commit, force-push to main
npm run push	Commit without bumping

⚠️ Do not run npm run release or npm run push casually. Both stage with git add . — anything untracked gets swept in — and both push with --force. Stage explicitly:

git add -- src/ youtube-tools.user.js package.json
git commit -m "feat: ..."
git push origin main

npm run bump touches no git state on its own. But a push that includes a bumped youtube-tools.user.js kicks off the release workflow, which publishes a public GitHub Release the moment it sees that version. Confirm the bump is intended before you push — a published release cannot be taken back, and deleting the tag afterwards only makes the next bump collide with it.

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Credits

Akari	Optimization & development
DeveloperMDCM	Original project creator
nvbangg	Audio-only & nonstop playback
WesselKroos	WebGL Ambilight — original extension

GPL-3.0 © Akari, DeveloperMDCM, nvbangg