Netflix video player in Chrome - how to seek?

Question

I have been unable to figure out how to do a video seek (automatically advance to a certain point in the video) in the Netflix video player running in Chrome. The currentTime property can be read but not set in the Netflix player, and when set, immediately triggers the error "Whoops! Something went wrong.". Other actions such as Play and Pause work quite well. For example, you can try the following:

1. Log into Netflix (from Google Chrome) and go to the movie Armageddon.
2. After the movie loads, pause it if it starts playing.
3. Open the Chrome Developer Tools panel. Go to the Console tab.
4. Paste the following snippet into the console and hit <ENTER>:

var video = document.evaluate('//*[@id="5670317"]/video',document).iterateNext()

Note: The id value is specific to Armageddon. If you choose a different movie, which is fine, change the id as per the id in the URL of that movie.

5. Enter the following and then press <Enter>: video.play(). Observe that the video resumes playing.

Simple enough, but how to make the video auto-advance to a specific point in the video? You may want to refer to this doc. Obviously you can manually seek by dragging the video player slider from left to right and release it someplace. You may wish to discover which method or event is called when you do this, and simulate that. I haven't had luck thus far.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Looks like netflix changed player api. Its what I found:

const videoPlayer = netflix
  .appContext
  .state
  .playerApp
  .getAPI()
  .videoPlayer

// Getting player id
const playerSessionId = videoPlayer
  .getAllPlayerSessionIds()[0]

const player = videoPlayer
  .getVideoPlayerBySessionId(playerSessionId)

Now you can use full player API. For example player.seek or player.getCurrentTime or player.pause, etc...

Answer 2

It will only work in console log of netflix if you want it to work in chrome extension then you need to inject this code in a script tag to make this work.

const videoPlayer = netflix.appContext.state.playerApp.getAPI().videoPlayer;
const player = videoPlayer.getVideoPlayerBySessionId(videoPlayer.getAllPlayerSessionIds()[0]);

player.seek(1091243) //seek to roughly 18mins

player.getCurrentTime() // will give you the current video time.