By now you probably know that one of Firefox 3.5 main features is the ability to show video encoded in Theora format natively, that is without the need of a plugin or any other software.
As good as this is, it has no option for showing the video in full screen. But as usual, it didn’t take much time before a extension came to the rescue to provide the necessary feature (in fact it has been available before Firefox 3.5 final).
Full Screen Video, by Dao Gottwald adds an option to video’s context menu to view a video in full screen mode. Right-click, select and watch.
There are a couple of caveats though: the video restarts when switching to full screen but I found it to be a problem much less annoying than I thought it would be. Also, full screen is only achieved on Windows. On other platforms it’s just a maximized window.
And if you don’t like the native video controls or get bored of them, you can customize them as almost everything else, Firefox audio and video controls are customizable (more work for theme authors!).
Long time community member, Ken Saunders, has released some cool skins you can try simply editing your userChrome.css file in your profile folder. Check Ken’s cool video player themes.
“Inspired by the need for larger media player controls that are displayed on the media player for open media (audio and video) now supported by Firefox 3.5 (awesome isn’t it), I created what I call a large, high visibility skin. While it’s true that one can use full page zoom to enlarge the size of a video (now you know), they may not always want to enlarge the whole video so the Hi-Vis-Light skin allows me (and hopefully others) to see the media controls at even small media window sizes including and especially the time and duration labels”.
“After I discovered how easy that it was to edit the videocontrols.css (though very time consuming), I decided to create a few more skins for the media player controls. I have others in the works including more colorful ones and a Hi-Vis Black one, and I’m sure that once it gets out that this is a piece of cake to do (or pie, whatever you prefer), there will be quite a number of new media player control skins being created including by those that will feel the need to create stupid ones that emulates Windows Media Player (etc) which of course goes against the grain of the open media concept itself”.
Hi-Vis-Light Controls
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Black-Gloss Controls
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Chrome-ish Controls
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