Bookmarklet: Maximize your YouTube videos

A few days ago I got pretty annoyed at YouTube:

• The video windows are really small, even enlarged. It doesn’t respect available screen size at all. It is impossible to size it arbitrarily.
• Fullscreen is cancelled when you adjust the system volume using hotkeys (Firefox+HTML5+Linux).
• Fullscreen is cancelled when you switch to a different application (HTML5, Flash).
• Fullscreen can’t be used even in a dual-head setup, i.e. run the video on one screen and work on another.
• Entering and leaving fullscreen causes video quality switching every single time (HTML5). That causes a few seconds lag. The only way to work around is to manually select video quality, then it’s not changed forth and back.

The net result: I swear a bloody vendetta to YouTube/Flash/Firefox developers every time I want to watch large videos and do something else (or adjust my volume!) at the same time.

I haven’t found any good solution for this on the Internets, so I created my own. Here’s my glorious bookmarklet:

>> Get YouTube Maximizer

(I had to create in on an external site, because WordPress doesn’t allow to insert bookmarklets into blogs. So just follow the link).

Drag and drop the button to your bookmarks bar in your browser. Then visit YouTube, open up some video and click the button in your bookmarks bar. The video should reload and fill your whole screen. It should also automatically switch to 720p quality, if available.

Before:

After:

This has several advantages:

1. Your browser window is fully resizable and the video dimensions change with it.
2. If you switch your browser to run in fullscreen, the video still works, even if you switch to a different application. Here we come, multi-head!
3. You no longer need to manually force HD video quality.

Some final notes:

• The bookmarklet source is here. Please bear in mind I have zero HTML/JS knowledge. If you have some patches, post them on github.
• Flash is required for this to work. Patches welcome on how to do the same thing with HTML5.
• If you want something else than 720p to be the default, just edit the bookmarklet and change quality="hd720" to something else.

Enjoy.

The heroes of Fedora 18 Final testing – wiki matrices

Fedora 18 development is over and I would like to thank all who contributed to Fedora 18 release testing. Below is a list of contributors together with the number of results they reported into our release validation wiki matrices (Install, Desktop and Base) for the Fedora 18 Final milestone:

User name	Reports submitted	Referenced bugs*
robatino	271	887991 853590 872844 887120 (4)
boblfoot	218	889896 890965 886314 883075 889908 885912 893918 891881 879187 873144 (10)
Wutao85	76
lnie	71	887201 856463 868777 873103 875599 (5)
vhumpa	61
satellit	58	879046 828197 893892 (3)
kparal	35
mkrizek	25
mkyral	21	892178 (1)
adamwill	20	858270 (1)
fholec	14	893005 892178 893030 (3)
jskladan	13
lbrabec	11	855824 873065 875599 (3)
bsanford	9
jpospisi	9	863337 (1)
tflink	8
konrad	6	810040 893699 (2)
cmurf	6
lzachar	6
jreznik	5
pschindl	5
mattdm	4
lnovy	4	892178 (1)
pkis	4	892178 (1)
robertjw	3	893875 (1)
bubeck	2
werkman	2	855513 (1)
nonamedotc	2
pdobbin	1
vehrlich	1
Hyprwave	1

* This is a list of bug reports linked to the wiki results. They don’t have to be reported by that concrete person.

The results are pretty interesting. Bob Lightfoot challenges Andre Robatino’s crown! 🙂 Together they have more test cases submitted than all the rest of us combined. Huge thanks, Andre and Bob!

I’d also like to specifically thank all community (non Red Hatter) contributors. Besides robatino and boblfoot, namely satellit and konrad have the most results.

Of course, kudos also to anyone else in the matrix. Fedora 18 was a hard and delayed release, and your effort helped us keep its quality up. Especially the new installer interface benefited greatly from lots of testing. Thanks!

If you haven’t participated in Fedora 18 release validation, we would love to see you in the Fedora 19 cycle (the test period will start in a month or so). Follow the announcements, and then please read QA/Join#Release_validation or talk to us in #fedora-qa on IRC.

Thanks everyone!

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When reading the statistics, please bear in mind that the numbers are not directly comparable. Different test cases have different complexity. Lots of people test, but they don’t fill in the test case results. Wiki matrices are just a single piece of a large puzzle, people can contribute and test Fedora in a number of other ways, which is not reflected here.
The statistics were generated by the release-test-stats.py script.

Multimedia codecs in Fedora 18

If you’ve installed/upgraded to Fedora 18 and you would like to play your media files (music and videos), this is the current way to go:

1. Add RPM Fusion repository.
2. Install codecs:

   $ yum install gstreamer1-libav gstreamer1-plugins-ugly

For some reason the Totem’s auto-search function is now broken, so you have to do it manually. I suspect the reason is that the package names have changed (compared to Fedora 17 and earlier).

Of course all of this only applies to citizens of those countries where software patents are not valid. Otherwise this action would probably be illegal and you might receive a capital punishment or similar.