If you have an ultra-wide monitor, you undoubtedly know the struggle. Streaming video and content from services, while created in 21:9, doesn’t quite give you the right look. This guide will show you how to get 21:9 fullscreen content to display properly on your ultrawide monitor.
The problem with ultrawide video
One of the main reasons to buy an ultrawide monitor is the ability to view content on a larger, clearer screen. You’d think watching videos on YouTube and streaming from Disney+ or other services would fill that need. They don’t.
In fact, most of the time the visuals never reach the edge of the screen. A 2:1 movie won’t display properly on your 21:9 monitor, and there are huge black bars gracing the sides of the content you’re watching. This is likely due to the relative age of ultrawide in general. This monitor size has been around for a while, but streaming service websites favor 16:9 all the way. Luckily, there’s a solution to get full-screen video on your ultrawide monitor.
Get Fullscreen Video on Ultrawide Monitors in Chrome
The Ultra wide monoprix I use now is great, but it suffers from the same video streaming issue as most. After some research, we found a very good extension on Google Chrome. It’s called Ultra wide video in the Google Chrome Web Store. Just go to the link and click Add to Chrome.
Once you’ve added the extension to Chrome, it should start working automatically on certain websites such as YouTube and Netflix. However, not all websites – like Disney+ – are natively supported. That’s why the extension has a few options to explore.
When you find yourself seeing horribly cropped videos online, you can simply click on the extension at the top right in Chrome. From there, you can manually override the extension and force crop. Click Forced cropping (experimental) and the video you’re watching should expand and reach the edges of your screen.
Between modes, there doesn’t seem to be a huge disparity in video quality between normal display and full screen on an ultrawide monitor. When the video fills your entire ultrawide screen you might lose a bit of quality under certain circumstances, but as far as we could tell there wasn’t much of a difference, at least not enough for us to consider to revert to large black borders around a small video.
You may need to play around with the extension a bit. To add, since this is not a native Chrome feature, there are likely to be bugs you encounter. Even if it is, this extension makes owning an ultrawide monitor a little more interesting and makes streaming movies and TV that much better.
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