I develop Ultrawidify, an extension for Firefox and Chrome. This is a tag for all Ultrawidify-related rants I come up with.
Every now and then, Ultrawidify gets a 2000 IQ idea in the mail: which is often (but not always) followed to a link that makes me silently judge people’s music tastes. Back in the day, such requests were ignored “because performance.” However, now that autodetection uses webgl, performance issues have been resolved to a large extent, and with autodetection taking only ~1-3 ms per… Continue Reading... "So what are subtitles, actually?"
![So that’s why [my extension’s secret message appeared in Google search results].](https://stuff.tamius.net/sacred-texts/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/code_header.jpg)
Slovenski prevod tukaj. This year hasn’t really been smooth sailing for my extension. I’ve had quite a few issues that — as is tradition — lots of people complained about in the reviews, while at the same time nobody really thought to … like, open an issue over on Github or even write me an e-mail or something? You don’t even need to stalk… Continue Reading... "So that’s why [my extension’s secret message appeared in Google search results]."
While using willReadFrequently does make reading data from a 2D HTML Canvas faster, it significantly worsens overall performance if you also draw to canvas a lot. Continue Reading... "Browser lied, performance died: a bit about HTML Canvas’ 2D context (and why you should read the docs)"
So here’s how the problem started. For the past few years, I’ve been working (on and off, but mostly off) on the UI overlay for Ultrawidify, for various reasons ranging from “some people asked for it” to “they have a point, because extension buttons in the extension toolbar aren’t accessible in full screen, so adding in-player UI would be nice.” Also, personally, I get… Continue Reading... "Hey Google … Why Does My Extension’s Hidden Message Appear in Google Search Results?"
Since the introduction of automatic aspect ratio detection in Ultrawidify, a performance issue would float by me. “Hey, when I watch a high resolution video on youtube, I get frame drops.” These issues tended to be rather common in the early days of autodetection. At some point, I remember thinking: “hey, webgl has been a thing for a while now. Instead of processing video… Continue Reading... "Hot dang, I shouldn’t have given on WebGL"
Some time around 2020, it became apparent that Google will ditch manifest v2 extension some time in relatively near future — right as I was starting to attempt to bring back the in-player UI. Unfortunately for me, 2020 is also the year I gained some new hobbies. I managed to find a reliable D&D party, which turned into plenty of D&D for a while.… Continue Reading... "Ultrawidify, manifest v3 and version 6"
Back in January, Chromium browsers had a bit of a fucky-wucky on Windows — though when I say “had,” I actually mean “this issue still happens.” The fucky-wucky in question causes the video to incorrectly stretch instead of cropping away the black bars. Here’s a pic for quick illustration. The issue first started to appearing mid-January and it started to appear across all extensions… Continue Reading... "Ultrawidify and Chrome (2021 edition, episode 2)"
Note (2021-08-19): Chrome has annoyed me into making a follow-up article, which contains a slightly more up-to-date information. As if Microsoft Edge screwing me over in 2020 wasn’t enough, as soon as Microsoft fixed their bugs, Google decided to introduce their own. In second-ish half of Januray, Chrome and Edge both received updates that broke pretty much every single extension for correcting video aspect… Continue Reading... "Ultrawidify and Chrome (2021 edition)"
It’s been a nice autumn evening when my phone buzzes. One new email, says the notification. It’s github. Ultrawidify doesn’t work on Edge at all. Not on youtube, not on Netflix, nowhere. Curious, I think to myself and wow to not take the Valve strategy this time around. Which, of course, happens anyway because it turns out that my weekends are considerably less free… Continue Reading... "Ultrawidify and Edge (2020 edition)"
It’s been a while since I’ve written about programming, but lately I’ve gotten back to working on Ultrawidify. With no major bugs or problems that require immediate fix, I can finally get to work on bugs and features that I’ve been kicking down the line for a while. Problem of the week are, of course, keyboards (or keyboard layouts). In javascript, you have roughly… Continue Reading... "Dealing with keyboards is mini-hell"