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:
Works (tested!) on Youtube and Netflix, but you can try your luck with other sites as well. Available for [Firefox (v2.0.3)](https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ultrawidify/) and [Chrome (v2.0.2)](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ultrawidify/dndehlekllfkaijdlokmmicgnlanfjbi). Should support theater mode on youtube, iframes only supported on fullscreen.
Working on this extension takes time, coffee and motivation. If you want to buy me a beer or something, you can [use this link to send me motivation](https://www.paypal.me/tamius). Money will be spent on Netflix and coffee/tea.
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.
Aspect ratio autodetection is achieved by performing some black magic every 30-something milliseconds. This currently can't be turned off by default. If this extension makes video sites lag too much, open an issue and include your hardware and OS — **this is important for me to know in order to better optimize autodetection.**.
Manually triggering aspect ratio change will suspend automatic aspect ratio detection for until the page is refreshed, although it'll maybe unsuspend itself when video is changed. I don't know for certain.
* Netflix autodetection not working in Chrome, wontfix as issue is fundamentally unfixable. (Although a different kind of workaround could probably be put in place, but don't count on it)
~~1. Handle porting of extension settings between versions. (Some people had some issues where extension broke until reinstalled, and corrupted settings seemed to be the problem.)~~ seems to work for me?
4. figure the best way to do GUI (injecting buttons into the player bar is not a good way. Been there, done that, each site has its own way and some appear to be impossible). Might get bumped to be released alongside #2
5. Stretch mode, because some people are very salty and toxic about the fact that this extension is here to solve a problem that's different than the one they want. More salty than me rn.
* **Fixed the situation with insane memory usage due to the automatic aspect ratio detection (#25, #32) and lag that appeared in certain cases after the extension has been running for a while.** There's still fun stuff going on — see notes below.
* Improved accuracy of automatic detection. This should fix the issue of rapid switching in dark videos or videos with otherwise uneven edges (#12 - [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaTGwlfRB_c); #24 - [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvZqHgFz51I) (see the car at the beginning))
Improved accuracy has increased the base RAM usage, and not by a small amount (I seem to have fixed my blunders, so that could _actually_ be on Firefox). As a result, I've reduced both resolution of the sample as well as polling frequency.
Polling of 1 check per second shouldn't use too much RAM. If you want automatic aspect ratio detection to react faster, you can up that number to 30 in the settings. 30 checks per second can be expensive: up to 400 MB if you've just started Firefox and went to youtube. Can go north of 2 gigs if you've been running Firefox for longer than that (seems to be a problem with Javascript garbage collection).
* Fixed some bugs with autodetection sometimes not working properly on Youtube.
Problem: there's this bit of code that keeps aspect ratio from changing when the difference between 'previous' and 'current' aspect ratio is too small. Unfortunately, the 'previous' value was _not_ updated on every aspect ratio switch for some reason. Also `ArDetect.init()` — for some reason — didn't always clean the 'previous' value even though it should.
The extension is being rewritten almost ground-up, around automatic aspect ratio detection. By default, this extension now only works in fullscreen, but due to some simplification it should work on most sites. As direct result of this simplification:
* The UI is completely gone
* Ability to add custom sites has been scrapped (might get implemented later on if some sites are a bit more problematic
* Extension broken up between smaller files, this time the proper way
* Added "the impossible aspect ratio autodetection"
* Adding ability to add custom sites (in progress)
* Most of the extension is being completely rewritten to accomodate that feature, which means there's a serious regression with Netflix support (no netflix at the moment)
* I'm also trying to break the 1500 line behemoth into smaller files.
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).
