UPDATE 2024-08-13

This setup has already broken. Back to the old Drawing Board.

What the hell do you mean, “Full Window Video”?

Exactly what it sounds like. I would like the video I’m watching, to “fill” the window it’s running in.

If you take your handy dandy browser window, with youtube, in this example, and make the window smaller, the video is going to scale with the window size, based on the aspect ratio, I assume. I’m not really a video guy, and didn’t really feel like diving into the code, to figure out how this all works.

I use 2 x 32" 1440p displays, and use one in a landscape and one in a portrait orientation, and on the landscape display, I tend to “quarter-tile” my windows. Oftentimes, while I’m coding, or whatever, I like to have a video playing in one of those quarters. And if you just quarter-tile a browser window, many sites tend to make the video pretty small in that window. Which annoys me.

Screenshot, for reference: screenshot

Right there, in the upper left of the “screen” on the right, you see a youtube video, that is “full window”.

Ok, great, why don’t you just use the “popout” feature in Firefox?

I have, for a long time, but that comes with some annoyances.

If, for instance, you’re watching something that’s only subtitled, or like to use the closed captioning, oftentimes those don’t show up in the “popout” window from firefox. You get a nice “full window” video, but the subtitles are playing back in the browser window you popped it out of. (/me glares at crunchyroll)

So this annoys me.

So how did you “solve” this issue?

As most people do, I keep a chromium based browser around, because I have things that complain about firefox.

I use Vivaldi as my chromium based browser of choice. Why? I don’t know, it’s just the one I picked, but this should work in any chromium based browser.

You can probably do this in Firefox just fine, with some similar extension, but Firefox on Linux no longer offers the ability to create PWA’s, for some inexplicable reason.

So pop on over to the Chrome Web Store, and look for an extension called Volume Booster.

Volume Booster? I thought you said you were doing things with web player video size?

Don’t ask me, I did some websearching, and this is the solution I came up with. There are probably other ways to do this, and frankly, I have no idea why an extension called “Volume Booster” would do anything to modify the video player behavior. But it does.

In any case, install the extension into your browser, and then pop over to YouTube, Crunchyroll, whatever, and “Install” it as a PWA.

Fire up your PWA (Vivaldi opens it automatically when you create the PWA, I don’t know if other browsers do.), start a video in that PWA, and click on whatever icon it provides to make the video “Full Screen”, and voila, it will make it “Full Window”. Pressing F11 will still make the video “Full Screen” if you need that.

Word of Warning about Volume Booster

Frankly, if you just install it, it’s going to make your audio sound like ass. Just go ahead and slide the volume down to 0 in the extension, to disable the “Volume Booster”. Basically it’s overdriving your audio gain, to make things louder, and even on my rather good headphones, the default level that it installs with, makes it sound like they’re going to explode. Maybe I’ll look for a different solution at some point, perhaps I won’t, this seems to do what I want for now.