YouTube: Watched badge

YouTube used to display a nice “watched” badge on videos which you’d already finished watching:

Maybe it’s still supposed to. But for me, they stopped appearing some time ago. This script brings them back, with customization for when they appear.

Settings

• Mark videos as watched based on…

  You can choose to mark a video as watched based on what percentage of the video you’ve watched, how much unwatched time remains at the end of the video, or both (the default). See the below settings to control what percentage and time remaining are used.

  Note that when using “Both”, a badge will be added if either the percentage or time remaining checks would add a badge.

• Add a badge if the percent watched is at least…

  When adding badges based on percentage watched, this is the threshold used (80%, by default). If you’ve watched at least this much of the video, a badge will be added.

• Add a badge if the time remaining is less than…

  When adding badges based on time remaining, this is the threshold used (one and a half minutes, by default). If no more than this amount of time remains unwatched at the end of the video, a badge will be added.

  Note that there is an exception to this; if the entire video is shorter than the time remaining you have set, a badge will never be added based on time remaining.

• Add a badge even to thumbnails which would normally hide it

  In some views (such as playlists), the thumbnails are small enough that YouTube hides the watched badge, even if it would otherwise be shown. When checked (the default), badges will be shown on those thumbnails anyway (though the text will be abbreviated to just “W” due to the small size). When unchecked, watched videos will still be faded, but the badge will not be visible.

Troubleshooting

• The badge doesn’t show up on the video I’ve watched most recently.

  YouTube has a lot of moving parts, and they don’t always talk to each other quickly. Often, after you leave a video, the progress bar that YouTube displays on its thumbnails won’t update for as long as a few minutes. Because the watched badge is always placed based on the that progress bar, it won’t know to add the badge until YouTube finishes updating.

  One possible solution to this is to reduce the “Add a badge if the percent watched is greater than…” setting. YouTube generally knows that you watched some of a video immediately after you close it, even if the latest value isn’t available.

• The badge never appears on any video.

  You may have your settings set up in such a way that no videos are triggering the badges. To fix this, open the script’s settings (your user script extension should have a menu item called “Configure watched badge”) and adjust them to your liking. There is a “Reset to defaults” link if you don’t know what they should be.

  If that doesn’t fix it, it could be that YouTube made a change which breaks this script. Open an issue (if one doesn’t already exist), and I’ll see what I can do to get things working again.