Reviews for Ultrawidify
Ultrawidify by Tamius Han
116 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14087255, 7 years agofantastic support for ultra wide problems. thank you
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 14066509, 7 years agoOkay really good extenstion that works well but I have 2 suggestions:
1. Change the default keybinds from the single to a ctrl+alt+. This is necessary to avoid unwanted aspect ratio changes while typing in streams chat.
2. Add more popular aspect ratios like 2.37:1 that most ultrawide monitor (and films) use. Most are imporperly called 21:9 but in reality is not 21:9. Even better give us the chance to add custom aspect ratios.Developer response
posted 7 years ago1. The extension actually shouldn't apply aspect ratio when you're typing in a text field in the first place. That seems to be a bug. Nice to know.
2. 21:9 option already uses 2.35:1 (might even be 2:39:1) internally (since most 21:9 videos use that ratio). Custom aspect ratios are on the menu (popular request), but they are not the biggest priority -- the next features to hit would be stretching, zooming (maybe) and improvements to autodetection (which often stops working when watching two videos back-to-back). - Rated 5 out of 5by Eldrazu, 7 years agoIt works! If you need to customize it, though, you're gonna have a hard time.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 14008913, 7 years agoBarely working plugin.
1) Auto detection is fully broken, takes a lot of ressources doing nothing. Constantly switches itself off. After reloading website on Youtube works for some minutes and adjusts (sometimes not correctly) content with huge delay (>10seconds at least). But as content inside same video switches proportions (specially trailer tend to show scenes in 21:9 with blackbar but the general cinema announcment in 16:9) plugin doesnt notice anything and remains idle.
If the plugin managed to recognize video you can at least enforce resizing with shortcuts. But too often the plugin failed to recognize any content and you have to reload the page, as nothing else will help you.
2) No real website profiling. Sad. Some presets would be nice.
3) If the site has more than one video (e.g. Steam Store) the plugin fails to recognize any second, third, further video and is not able to stretch these.
It's a shame. A simple edge/blackborder detection would have done the job easily. At least general ultrawide support and awareness is raising.Developer response
posted 7 years ago> A simple edge/blackborder detection would have done the job easily.
There's no such thing as "simple edge/blackborder detection." I've started the entire autodetection approach with a "simple" approach first, and it quickly became obvious that simple doesn't cut it. There's simply too much false positives. But we'll come back to auto-detection later.
> After reloading website on Youtube works for some minutes and adjusts (sometimes not correctly) content with huge delay (>10seconds at least).
Technical limitations. Youtube starts playing video before the page has finished loading. Extensions (to my knowledge) only start running when webpage has been fully loaded.
In addition to that, there's two more problems that can cause additional delays:
* there's edge cases which cause autodetection script to do nothing, because video doesn't contain enough data to determine the aspect ratio
* aspect ratio detection only runs once per second due to technical limitations of Javascript's memory management. I'm not kidding.
> But too often the plugin failed to recognize any content
Too often, the popup seems to lie.
> Auto detection is fully broken, takes a lot of ressources doing nothing. Constantly switches itself off.
Autodetection takes a lot of resources because it's written in javascript. Autodetection is written with javascript because javascript is the only¹ option that runs in-browser. Javascript is also utter garbage for this purpose.
To date, ridiculously great amounts of time were spent trying to improve resource usage (especially RAM usage, which gets really bad if you run autodetection script more than two times a second), and the answer has consistently been 'pound sand' and 'cry is free'.
EDIT: Apparently the bug where autodetection shuts itself on between videos is back. However, there's a new feature that turns off automatic detection when it detects things are taking too much time, so I'll leave this bit here.
When automatic detection runs on slower hardware, everything takes longer. Javascript is single-threaded and blocking, meaning that as long as autodetection script runs, the rest of the browser is going to wait and do nothing. This causes noticeable lag/stutter (on my other test machine), which is why a decision was made: if autodetection consistently takes too long to complete, we'll turn it off. After all, having no autodetection (with ability to manually set aspect ratio) beats laggy video.
Too long is 15 milliseconds, which seems like a reasonable number for various reasons.
Consistently means 'over 15 milliseconds for more than 5 seconds in a row.'
> 3) If the site has more than one video (e.g. Steam Store) the plugin fails to recognize any second, third, further video and is not able to stretch these.
Known issue. There's no easy solution as each approach to pages with multiple videos has some drawbacks. At the end of the day, though, things take time, and priorities are Youtube > Netflix > Amazon Prime (currently not officually supported) > everything else (also no official support), though.
There's a reason extension is disabled elsewhere by default. We've had that experiment once and it was a bit too ambitious.
EDIT: whoopsie, it seems that the bug with autodetection not starting on video change is back. Sorry about those earlier assumptions.
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¹Okay webasm is an unexplored venue. It's going to stay unexplored for a while. WebGL is another thing that sounds like something possibility worth exploring if I had time to explore the possibilites. Both would be a ton of work requiring a ton of time, and time is something that's a bit hard to come by with a full time job. - Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 13885103, 7 years agoDoesn’t work anymore. The aspect-ratio buttons are gone and the automatic aspect-ratio works perfectly wrong every time, so it’s useless.
Developer response
posted 7 years ago> the automatic aspect-ratio works perfectly wrong every time, so it’s useless.
Untick this: https://imgur.com/iN1orfZ
Also go here: -> https://github.com/xternal7/ultrawidify/issues
and add a few links (with timestamps, preferably) to the problematic videos. Optionally also include screenshots that illustrate the issue.
> The aspect-ratio buttons are gone
Moved to here, actually: https://imgur.com/Irfd05Q - and keyboard shortcuts should still work. - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13828963, 7 years agoI really like this extension when watching mixed aspect-ratio videos, the extension quickly catches the black bars and shrinks or stretches the video automatically to the correct ratio.
Sadly I had to uninstall the extension, as it breaks video players on several sites including reddit. The blacklist option doesn't work to resolve this issue. Would love to install again someday when this is fixed.Developer response
posted 7 years agoThe issue with reddit and other sites should be fixed. It's not a proper fix, I've just set extension to not work on any site other than youtube or netflix and sites that you explicitly enabled via the extension button/popup.
I've also kinda solved the problem with the memory leak: extension will only check for changes in aspect ratio once per second if the video is playing. This massively reduces RAM usage back to acceptable/negligible levels.
On that note: I've also added an option for you to change how often the extension checks for changes in aspect ratio, but turning that number back to 30 (what it used to be) is not recommended because RAM usage will skyrocket for technical reasons (tl;dr of which is pretty much "blame javascript"). - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13747437, 7 years agoPlease return control buttons on bottom player bar. Or make its activation as option.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 12560938, 7 years agoубраны кнопки соотношения сторон , видимо разработчики решили что без них лучше , все как всегда сделать хорошо а потом все испортить
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 13719283, 7 years ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 13499140, 7 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13696797, 7 years ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 13685058, 7 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13671024, 7 years agoWorks nearly flawlessly (the buttons on the video player disappeared, but they keyboard shortcuts still work just fine). Love it.
- Rated 5 out of 5by caio.matrix, 7 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 13599090, 7 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 6001196, 7 years agoAwesome job! Since I got an ultrawide monitor, I was sick of all the retards who post ultrawide videos with black bars on YouTube. This add-on solves the problem beautifully, keyboard shortcuts and control panel added to the video work perfectly too!
Thank you! - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13606013, 7 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by drsal, 7 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 13455126, 7 years agoJust let me click the widen button on all netflix videos... don't make it check imbd or whatever, just put the button there for everything! thanks :)
Developer response
posted 7 years agoNetflix is actually broken right now (according to multiple reports), but unfortunately I haven't been able to get access to netflix yet.
I'm working on a fix (along with some other changes), though — but the buttons aren't making a comeback. Only the keyboard shortcuts will stay. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 12700324, 7 years agoGreat plugin, works perfectly on youtube but stopped working on netflix recently. Still a must have to any 21:9 users.