If you own an ultrawide monitor, you have probably noticed that sometimes videos aren't encoded properly — they feature black bars on all four sides. This could happen because someone was incompetent (note: as far as youtube is concerned, improperly rendered videos might be due to youtube's implementation of certain new features). The extension kinda fixes that by doing this:
The technology has been here for a while, but plenty of people don't know how to properly encode a video (despite the fact [youtube has an article that explains aspect ratios](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6375112)). Plenty of people surprisingly includes major Holywood studios, such as [Marvel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke1Y3P9D0Bc), [Disney](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCOPJi0Urq4), [Dreamworks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKiYuIsPxYk), [Warner Brothers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYZ3U1inHA4), [Sony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BWWWQzTpNU), et cetera. You'd think that this is the one thing Holywood studios and people who make [music videos for a living](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Mx2mxpaCY) would know how to do right, but they don't. This extension is here to fix that.
To be entirely fair to the blender foundation, the video featured above is properly encoded. (However, few accounts that reposted it didn't sport the same levels of competence).
The 'more settings' menu contains all the buttons on the control bar, plus an option to force a specific aspect ratio — in case you're trying to watch a 16:9 video, that's encoded as 4:3 video, on a 21:9 monitor.
These options might show some benefit for people not using 21:9 monitors, as they would allow you to crop a (proper) 21:9 to 16:9 (remove black bars at the cost of some video). 'Fit to height' would often do the same job, though.
Automatic aspect ratio detection on Netflix works by grabbing the title of the video off Netflix' control bar and throws it at some third party services. First, it takes the title and throws it at OMDB. OMDB replies with IMDB id. We then throw that id at IMDB, which replies with 1700+ lines (and aspect ratio information is hopefully somewhere among them). If OMDB doesn't find the movie — or if the IMDB doesn't have information about aspect ratio for that particular title — automatic detection fails. There's also a posibility that this method returns the wrong data, as there's a possibility that multiple movies share the same title.
As Netflix relies on extension re-initializing at least the UI ***a lot***, the optimization introduced in 1.0.2 was reversed (as waiting 2 seconds for the UI to appear is just too much).
Furthermore, triggering UI re-initialisation on onUpdated events turned out to not be the proper way to go: immediately after the extension is initialized, onUpdated gets triggered even more often than your average Buzzfeed writer/reader. But change the episode on Netflix and suddenly, onUpdated gets barely triggered at all — which means that more often than not, the UI extension injects into the page wasn't visible. (the fuck, really)
This is why Netflix uses another function that manually checks whether the player bar is present. Ideally that check happens every tenth of a second, but Firefox may be limiting that to one per second.
The 'extension sometimes not working' bug was fixed (by having extension try to setup every time a page got updated), but the fix had some problems. Namely, the extension would re-initiate (complete with re-adding the entire UI) itself very _very_ often.
This could be a problem, so it was fixed. Extension is notified of updates only every ~2 seconds (which absorbs most of the "page was updated" events on page load) and doesn't attempt to reload the UI if the UI was already loaded. (Unless `debugmsg` is set to true. It's generally not, but any commits to this repo could potentially still have it enabled).
Fixed the bug where sometimes the extension would fail to work. (example: you opened youtube's search page in a brand new tab. You then opened a video from the search results (_not_ in a new tab). Extension wouldn't work at all in videos opened in that manner).
