A lot of us listen to music or watch videos on YouTube or any
of the other media services through Google Chrome. As you surf
the internet and watch videos or listen to music, you create a
breadcrumb trail of activity and it’s a bit of a hassle to find
the last played music or video in Chrome’s history.
Back in 2019, Google added ‘media control’ tool to Chrome’s
menu bar and the company is now working on yet another feature
that will work with the existing media playback bar.
Chrome for Windows 10, Linux and macOS will receive a new
feature that would help you track your media playback history
in the browser. A Google engineer has submitted a series of
commits in the Chromium Gerrit for a feature called ‘media
history’.
According to the commits, Google Chrome will allow you to
easily access your media playback history. Once you enable the
feature, media playback history is maintained separately within
the browser and Google will also give you let you delete media
URLs from its history.
Your media playback history will be removed when you delete an
item from the Chrome History.
“For Media History we have a sessions table that records media
sessions that we can resume. At the moment we are only
interested in video with audio. This adds a
MediaAudioVideoState enum that contains data about whether a
media session is audio only or has both audio and video. For
web sessions, this will follow the routed frame since that is
where the metadata we are using for media history is coming
from,” Google engineer wrote.
At the moment, you can access the beta UI at
Chrome://media-history after enabling the flag in Chrome
Canary. It has a basic web UI and it’s not intended for users
yet.
Google might announce the new feature later this year after
rolling out Chrome 83 to users.
