Zoomify

About

A Chromium extension that dynamically detects baked-in black bars (letterboxing) in YouTube videos and zooms to fill your screen with actual content — without cropping real video.

## The Problem

Many YouTubers bake cinematic black bars into their 16:9 video (e.g., 21:9 content inside a 16:9 frame). On an ultrawide monitor, this means black bars on **all four sides** — pillarboxes from the 16:9 viewport, plus letterboxes baked into the video itself. You lose significant screen real estate.

Existing "zoom to fill" solutions (like Plex HTPC) aren't intelligent — they blindly zoom all content, cropping real video when no bars are present.

## How It Works

AutoZoomer samples video frames to a small canvas (16x128 pixels by default), scans for black bar boundaries using multi-column consensus, and applies a CSS transform to zoom the video — pushing the bars off-screen while keeping all real content visible.

It handles:

- **Dynamic aspect ratio changes** — Videos that switch between 16:9 and 21:9 mid-playback (e.g., cinematic shots intercut with dialogue)
- **Viewport-aware clamping** — Zoom never exceeds what your monitor can display, so no content is lost off-screen
- **Subtitle detection** — Detects burned-in subtitles in bar regions and applies asymmetric zoom (crops top bar, preserves bottom with padding)
- **Low-light resilience** — Dynamic black level adaptation, multi-column consensus, and consecutive-frame confirmation prevent false positives on dark scenes

https://github.com/Ayymoss/Zoomify

The screenshots in preview had to be manipulated so Google would accept them. So please note Screenshot 1 and 4 aren't representative. 1 is to showcase the behaviour on Widescreen monitors. 4 is to show the 'original', but it's not really visible in the screenshot.