Script Summary: Resizes the video player to the full width and height of the screen so you can watch it on a multi-monitor system without having it resize when changing windows.
Updated 5/5/2010:
-Fixed the script so that it now uses regex to detect the width and height of the video.
Sometimes it feels like whoever it is that designs video players for websites only ever uses one monitor on their computer and always has their resolution set really really low. The video starts out way to small for anything but 1024 width resolution, and when you try and go full screen it will display a larger video only so long as you do not try and do anything else while the video is playing. This makes anyone who has more than one monitor have to sit and wait until the video is finished playing before they can start using their second monitor again, which really bugs me!
Some websites like YouTube have the ability to enlarge the video size on the page, open the video in a popup window, or even let you use the browser's zoom feature to resize the video as big as you want. Most however, like TED.com, do not have any of these features, and while I love their videos I hate that they don't have any support for multiple monitors.
To fix this I created a user script that works in Firefox and Google Chrome and will resize the video to be the full width and height of the screen. That way you can watch the video on a second monitor without loosing the ability to work with other windows open on another monitor. You can also scroll down the page to view the comments, bio or other links while the video is still playing. See the screenshots for a picture of what the full webpage looks like when rendered on a 1600x900 resolution LCD TV.
It only works with the TED.Com flash player, which most of the videos use but some do not. Some of the videos are hosted on YouTube, but as I mentioned before YouTube already has a few different ways of enlarging the video size so that should not be a problem. I'll be releasing similar scripts for other video sites so check my profile or blog for more if you like this one.
