Creating courses or following chess videos with LiChess Tools

This post is again discussing a feature in the browser extension that I am developing: LiChess Tools , but I really hope this will get adopted natively, because it's so simple and yet so powerful. I am talking about the Study link options - Video popup feature

Have you ever tried one of the chess courses on web sites like Chessable, Chessmood or so many others? They have something in common: they alternate chess move lessons with videos. Wouldn't it be cool to have this option in Lichess studies? How impactful would it be to study how Eric Rosen plays the Stafford Gambit, for example, while he is talking to you from a video at the same time?

In Lichess, if you put URLs to videos in the move comments in studies, you see them as links in the move list and/or when playing interactive lessons as comments. Normally, you would click on a link and it would open a new tab. Then you have the option of either watching the video or making moves on Lichess.

With the Video popup feature, clicking on the link will open a movable, resizable popup with the video over your study. You can make the moves in the video WHILE you're watching it. This opens a lot of opportunities:

• watching the video and following it by making the moves in the study
• adding videos to your study, so that they are more like chess courses
• adding video hints on interactive studies

What's even better is that the feature supports links that start at a specific timestamp (and for YouTube also end at a specific timestamp), meaning you can put links to the same video, but different sections, all over the study.

Now, obviously this works just for the people that installed LiChess Tools. Some people can't or won't install it, so if you are creating a course-like Lichess study with carefully crafted links, your audience would need to install it. That is why I hope this idea will catch on and be popular enough to be adopted by Lichess as a native feature! You have to make some noise for that to happen, though! Or convince everybody to install LiChess Tools, I could begrudgingly go with that option.

At the moment the video sources supported are: YouTube, Vimeo and TwitchTv.

Why don't you give it a go and tell me what you think? Or use the horsey emoji, which I still don't know what means