Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Full Screen Google Video on OS X Hack

I wanted to watch Waterborne on Google Video full screen on my widescreen LCD. Google Video supports a full screen mode. You click the button in the lower right hand corner of the player and it opens a new maximized browser window. Firefox doesn't support a full screen or kiosk mode on OS X, so you can still see the browser title bar, the window border, the Apple menu, and the player controls. Very distracting. To top it off, Waterborne is letterboxed not widescreen; it has black bars on the top and bottom so the video still doesn't take up all the available space. Luckily I found a solution. If you go to the "Universal Access" preference pane in "System Preferences", you can enable zooming. OS X makes it easy to smoothly zoom in on an arbitrary part of the screen. I had a little trouble scrolling to the right (I set it to scroll "only when the pointer reaches an edge"), but it wasn't a show stopper. Actually, it worked like a charm. If you hadn't seen me do it, you'd never know the difference.

1 Comments:

Blogger Online Degree said...

Hey... thanks for the hack. I'm not at my Mac right now so I can't try it, but I'll be sure to give it a go this weekend. Thanks for sharing the insight.

11:15 PM  

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