It’s a tale as old as time. You get home after a long day of work or school and stuff some dinner into your face. You do the dishes, finish up some work you need to get ready for the next day, walk the dog, do some cleaning, and take care of anything else that needs to be done. Then you plop yourself down on a couch or in your bed and start binging the new season of your favorite show. All of a sudden you wake up to find that it’s now 2 o’clock in the morning. You fell asleep after just a few minutes of your show, and you proceeded to miss the next three episodes.
It happens to all of us, and it’s pretty annoying because the next time you sit down to watch, you have to spend 10 minutes flipping around through different episodes in order to figure out exactly how much you missed. What you might not realize though, is that there’s a nifty Netflix plugin that helps limit the damage and its completely free.
Netflix Autoplayer is a Chrome browser extension that is available as a free download from the Chrome Web Store. Developed by Matt Evanoff, the plugin allows you to set a sleep timer that will automatically stop Netflix playback after a certain amount of time. But it doesn’t end there — this nifty plugin can also be configured to put your computer to sleep or even shut it down entirely after it stops playback. It’s a smart way to stop missing shows and stop wasting power after you’ve fallen asleep.
The extension’s full description follows below, along with a link to download it from Google’s Chrome Web Store.
Autoplays Netflix TV Shows – Shuts down computer when done
Netflix Autoplayer With Computer Sleep / Shutdown
0.8 Updates:
Added support for Chromecast!0.7 Updates:
Fixed a Javascript error that was breaking everything0.6 Updates:
*Added episode counter in addition to timer
*Pausing video stops timer
*Fixed bugs when stopping0.5 Updates:
*Play/Pause, Next and Stop media buttons on keyboard now work with Netflix.
*ctrl+q now causes the same action as the sleep timer ending (ex: pause movie & sleep).This will autoplay Netflix TV shows for the amount of time you tell it. When the time has finished, it can Shutdown/Sleep your computer.
IMPORTANT:
For the ‘Sleep’ functionality to work, once you have installed the extension, you must download the install.bat file that you will see a link for at the bottom of the dialog for the extension. You must run this (and I believe you might need administrator privileges when you do) it creates a couple files that are needed and adds a registry entry. Really, in general I would say you should not do something like that. You shouldn’t be running random things people on the internet tell you to. If you want the ‘Sleep’ to work though, that’s what you need to do. If you understand how .bat files work, it is actually really small, so you can check out what it is doing.Once you have done the above you can actually edit one of the files it creates, it is located at:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Netflix-Autoplay\shutdown.batAnd by default should have the following:
:: Lock
::rundll32.exe User32.dll,LockWorkStation
:: Shutdown
::Shutdown.exe -s -t 00
:: Hibernate
::rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll,SetSuspendState
:: Sleep
rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState 0,1,0As you can see, ‘Sleep’ is what it does by default, but I have entries for Hibernate, Shutdown, and Lock all listed, just uncomment the one you want and comment the others back out…Hell if you want you could really put anything you like in that file and make it run anything when the timer gets to zero.
GitHub: https://github.com/rtpmatt/Netflix-Autoplay-Chrome-Extension
My Website: http://www.mattevanoff.com/
