Reviews for Ultrawidify
Ultrawidify by Tamius Han
114 reviews
- 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.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13321847, 7 years agoI use this addon to watch Netlix in 21:9, recently it stopped working on Netflix. The control panel isn't displayed, using D to force 21:9 isn't working either.
On youtube, the control panel is being displayed and the key shortcut D is also working.
But as i mainly use this addon when watchin Netflix (i rarely need to watch a music video in 21:9) im really bothered by it not working.
Also, even as it still worked on Netflix - the automatic ratio detecion never worked, not on youtube and not on netflix.
Would appreciate it greatly if you could fix this soon.Developer response
posted 7 years agoPlease make bug reports on Github, as it makes it easier for me to track them.
https://github.com/xternal7/ultrawidify/issues
Regarding netflix: thanks for mentioning it. Unfortunately, I won't be able to fix netflix until at least two months from now due to financial issues.
Regarding autodetection: It was specifically stated it only works on Netflix. Are you sure you sure your Netflix is in English (and that the movie is in English/original title)? Are you sure that the movie is on iMDB _and_ OMDB?
Given that I'm finally freed of my real-life commitments that took most of my time for the past six months, I'm slowly starting working on this extension again, which makes me rather interested in the details of any reported bug. - Rated 1 out of 5by Mateus, 7 years agoit doesnt crop properly, it just do a zoom, and every video i watch i need to enable this app, terrible
Developer response
posted 7 years agoBug reports this way please ---> https://github.com/xternal7/ultrawidify/issues
Take care to include browser version, OS, monitor resolution, other extensions.
Potentially also screenshots because I don't know what the hell you mean with 'doesn't crop properly'. "Fit to width" should crop perfectly if you're watching 21:9 content encoded in non-21:9 aspect ratio on a 21:9 monitor.
And if you have a monitor with aspect ratio wider than 21:9 (this one Samsung), you should use 'Force aspect ratio' option for proper letterbox removal.
(Also please note I'm currently on hiatus due to some personal issues. If all goes well, I'll be able to continue with October)
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EDIT: I think I might have randomly stumbled over the "doesn't crop properly" instance. There's this trailer for Salt that's 16:9 + letterbox, but the video isn't 21:9. This leads to extension cropping away too much:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ40WlshNwU
Which is why there's zoom/unzoom binds.
Automatic aspect ratio was impossible(-ish)¹ a year ago. It's still impossible-ish¹ now.
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¹It's actually within the realm of theoretical possibility, but whether that's gonna work with Youtube is unclear until I test it. There's also further potential complication with attempting auto-aspect ratio on youtube, vaguely outlined under this review:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ultrawidify/reviews/829521/
TL;DR: potential performance issues.
Inb4 "but it can be done on netflix" — Netflix aspect ratio "autodetection" isn't true autodetection and is only possible because IMDB generally posts aspect ratio of every movie it knows.