Usage

Before you start

Open your CyTube channel in a tab and make sure it is actually connected - the socket must be live, because the extension emits through it. Then open a YouTube video.

1. The in-page button

On a YouTube watch page a floating Send to CyTube control is appended to the body. It has two parts:

• The large button sends immediately using your saved defaults.
• The ... options button beside it opens a panel for changing the target tab, queue position, and temp flag.

The large button relabels itself as it works: Sending..., then Queued or Sent on success, or Setup needed on failure. It reverts to Send to CyTube after about 1.8 seconds.

When a quick send fails, the options panel opens automatically with the specific error in its status line - so the failure path always tells you what to fix rather than just that something broke.

Note

The control is created only when the current URL parses as a supported YouTube video, and it is removed when you navigate away from one. It follows YouTube’s client-side navigation via a MutationObserver plus the yt-navigate-finish and popstate events.

2. The right-click menu

Right-click any YouTube video link - homepage, subscriptions, search results - and pick Send to CyTube. This path always uses your saved defaults; there is no dialog.

Feedback appears as a badge on the toolbar icon for about 3.5 seconds: a green OK or a red ERR, with the full message in the icon’s tooltip.

The menu item is registered for link contexts on YouTube document URLs, and its target URL patterns cover the four YouTube hosts plus youtu.be.

3. The toolbar popup

Click the extension icon. The popup pre-fills the URL field from the active tab if that tab is a supported YouTube video, and otherwise lets you paste any supported URL. Below that you get the target tab dropdown with a Refresh button, the position select, and the temp checkbox.

As you type, a hint line under the field either echoes the parsed Video ID: or tells you the URL is not supported - so you know before pressing send.

Tip

The popup is the reliable place to complete a first-time site-access grant for a new CyTube host. Once granted, the in-page button works for that host too.

4. Sending a video you are not watching

Paste any supported URL into the popup. Every entry point funnels through the same parser, which reduces the URL to its 11-character video ID, so a shorts, live, embed, or youtu.be link is queued exactly like a watch link.

What the result messages mean

Message	What happened
Queued in #channel.	CyTube echoed a queue packet matching your video and your username. Confirmed.
Request sent to #channel.	The emit went out but no reply arrived within 5 seconds. It may still have worked.
CyTube rejected the queue request.	A queueFail packet came back; where CyTube supplied a reason, that reason is shown instead.
Open your CyTube channel in another tab first.	No tab looked like a CyTube channel.
This tab is not a CyTube channel page.	The tab ran the injection but exposed no window.CHANNEL.
CyTube is disconnected in the selected tab.	socket.disconnected was true. Reconnect the tab.
Your current CyTube user cannot add videos in this channel.	The playlistadd check failed.
Site access is required for the selected CyTube tab.	The origin permission prompt was declined.
Enter a valid YouTube watch, short, or youtu.be URL.	The URL did not yield an 11-character video ID.

1. Confirmed success requires the echoed item’s media type to be yt, its ID to match, and - when window.CLIENT.name is readable - its queueby to be you. This is what keeps somebody else’s simultaneous add from being reported as yours.

2. A timeout is reported honestly as pending rather than as success or failure, because the emit is fire-and-forget and CyTube may simply have been slow.