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.
I'd demo with [Sintel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ) but they encoded the video without the black bars. ~~Thanks, Blender Foundation.~~ Actually they're not off the hook.
[v1.0-rc1 — Experimental version — download from here](http://tamius.net/ultrawidify) — If 30 minutes old is stable enough for you, this is it. This version is pretty much code from this repo. It's also unlisted so I don't have to go through AMO for every minor change. It hasn't been tested whether autoupdating works, and it probably doesn't.
[v1.0.0 — Regular version — download from AMO](https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ultrawidify/) — more stable and with AMO's approval. No experimental features either.
As of version 0.9.6, there's also experimental feature that will try to force an aspect ratio for the video. You specify the aspect ratio of the video you're watching. Extension then looks at the actual aspect ratio of the video. If aspect ratios are different, extension assumes that video contains black borders and zooms in on the video, so the black bars are removed. For example: if the video you're watching is 4:3, but you specify it's actually 16:9, then the extension will zoom on 16:9 section inside that video.
As of 0.9.9, option to force aspect ratio is available from settings. That's this button:
More or less everything. Works regardless of whether the video is in fullscreen or not. Works regardless if the youtube video you're watching is embedded on some other page.
* Have extension remember the last setting when switching between fullscreen and not fullscreen. Have an option to remember last selected aspect ratio.
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).
