Ultrawidify — aspect ratio fixer for youtube and netflix

TL;DR

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 and Chrome. Should support theater mode on youtube, iframes only supported on fullscreen.

Youtube demo of autodetection stuff can be found here.

Beggathon

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. Any donations are well appreciated.

The long version

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). Plenty of people surprisingly includes major Holywood studios, such as Marvel, Disney, Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, Sony, et cetera. You'd think that this is the one thing Holywood studios and people who make music videos for a living would know how to do right, but they don't. This extension is here to fix that.

Features

• Fit video to width/height
• Force specific aspect ratio
• Attempts to automatically detect aspect ratio
• Rebindable shortcuts temporarily off

User interface

Most quick options for a page are accessible through a button in the extension bar. The options are pretty self-explanatory.

Default keyboard shortcuts

w - fit to width
e - fit to height
r - reset

a - attempt to automatically determine the aspect ratio

s - force 16:9
d - force 21:9
x - force 18:9

About aspect ratio autodetection

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.

Installing

Permanent install / stable

Latest stable for Firefox — download from AMO

Latest stafle for Chrome — download from Chrome store

Installing the current, github version

1. Clone this repo
2. Open up Firefox
3. Go to about:debugging
4. Add temporary addon
5. Browse to wherever you saved it and select manifest.json

Known issues

• 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)
• Everything reported in issues

Plans for the future

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? 2. Reintroduce gradual zoom on z and u and provide a way to 'scroll' the zoomed in video up/down left/right reintroduce settings page (rebindable keys, blacklist/whitelist management, some settings for automatic aspect ratio detection) 3. site-specific options for sites that require additional CSS classes or other hacks (see: vimeo, which is disabled) 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. 6. Improvements to automatic aspect ratio detection

Changelog

see changelog.md

todo: add link to changelog.md here