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 on Youtube and Netflix. Available for [Firefox (v1.2.1)](https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ultrawidify/) and [Chrome (v1.2.1)](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ultrawidify/dndehlekllfkaijdlokmmicgnlanfjbi).
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.
Most quick options for a page are accessible through a button in the extension bar. The options are pretty self-explanatory. **NOT YET AVAILABLE IN CHROME due to API incompatibilites between Firefox and Chrome** — if anyone has any experience with `tabs.sendMessage` and `runtime.sendMessage` in Chrome, I'd like to recommend myself for some free pro tips on how to fix that with minimal changes to how the code works.
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.
[v2.0.1 — Regular version — download from Chrome store](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ultrawidify/dndehlekllfkaijdlokmmicgnlanfjbi) (No UI tho, just keyboard shortcuts)
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).
