The Turn Off the Lights Extension Can Do Much More Than Just Darken Your Browser
Chrome / Firefox: If you’ve ever used a web browser in the past eight years, you’ve probably heard of the Turn Off the Lights extension ( Chrome , Firefox ). It’s the best way to automaticallymerge your YouTube videos when you start watching, and of course darken your browser background for a more beautiful viewing experience (even if you’re already using YouTube’s dark mode).
An extension can do a lot more, however, and you probably didn’t have a chance to play around in its options menu to discover all of its advanced features. We don’t blame you; there is a lot to watch and it wastes time for all theYouTube pets you could watch. Here are some of the more advanced settings that make Turn off the Lights really shine:
Automatically stop (most) autoplay videos
About the middle of the Turn Off the Lights main settings page is a section called AutoStop. This is where you can tell the add-on that you want the videos not to play automatically whenever possible – by covering them with a large red or transparent banner, which you then need to click to play the video.
AutoStop doesn’t work on all video players on the internet, but I’ve found it does a pretty good job of keeping most videos from blowing me up with noise during my daily viewing. I also appreciate that the app allows you to whitelist or blacklist sites – useful if you don’t mind autoplaying videos except for the most serious offenders, or if you hate all autoplaying videos except those you can find. on a tiny handful of sites.
Automatically make YouTube prettier to play
Hidden at the bottom of the Turn Off the Lights’ Basics settings menu are two of its most useful features. If you’re a big YouTube fan, they are just as important as its AutoStop feature. The first allows all YouTube videos you watch on the site to automatically expand to “Theater Mode,” a prettier presentation that fills the top half of the screen with your videos.
The second option lets you choose the default resolution for each YouTube video. If you have a gorgeous 4K display and have the bandwidth to support it, then the default 2160p ensures that any 4K content you upload to YouTube takes full advantage of your monitor’s many pixels. And if you have a poor internet connection and hate the long wait for your YouTube videos to upload, going back to a lower resolution like 720p can help.
Enabling Ambient Lighting for HTML5 Video Players
I’ve always been a fan of diagonal TV lighting , although it might seem a little gimmicky. Done right – with no lag between what you see on your screen and any lighting effect behind your display – ambient lighting can make your party more exciting and fun.
While this feature goes a bit against its name, Turn Off the Lights also has an ambient light mode for your browser. Click on the “Visual effects” option in the sidebar of the settings and click on “Show atmospheric lighting effect of the currently playing video”.
The next step is very important. The extension uses one ugly ambient light color by default – not really useful or pretty. Instead, click on the icon that looks like an LED light bulb with a multicolored rainbow shooting out from the top. There, turn on the “Extract color from video” option and, if your system doesn’t mind, increase the frames per second of “vivid atmospheric effects” to 30.
Now when you go to play videos in an HTML5 player – like everything on YouTube , for example – you get a wonderful glow around your video that matches what you are watching. And if you want to limit your ambient lighting usage to multiple websites, you can (again) whitelist or blacklist sites for this feature by clicking the spotlight icon to the right of the rainbow LED light in the Lights Off section. Visual effects “.
Adjust video volume by simply swiping your mouse
If you want to adjust the volume of the video being played without having to click on icons and fiddle with the player’s volume controls, click Advanced Options in the Turn off Lights sidebar settings and scroll down until you see the video volume slider.
Enable this option: “Control the volume of the current video player by scrolling the mouse.” I also recommend selecting the “Only if alt key pressed” setting so that each click of the mouse wheel or movement of your laptop’s touchpad does not increase or decrease the volume. (This can be annoying.)
Turn on night mode for everything
If you like the Turn Off the Lights concept for video content, the extension can also provide any website with a pseudo night mode. Click on the “Night mode” option on the sidebar of the extension’s settings screen and enable “Show night switch button below web page to make the page dark or light”. Now when you browse the web, you will see that this little radio button appears (by default) in the lower left corner of your browser. Click on it and the page colors will become darker:
You can, as always, only set up night mode on certain sites. You can also set the extension to show the night mode switch only if you are browsing the web for a specific period of time, such as at night. You can also set the “Night Mode” extension to automatically activate whenever you “dim the lights” using its regular browser icon.
Maybe avoid webcam gestures and speech recognition
I appreciate that the developers at Turn Off the Lights wanted to be careful, so the extension also includes two options that allow you to dim the background of a website by waving your hand in front of the webcam or barking commands on your desktop or laptop.
The first one can be a little fussy. When I tried this, it seemed to me that the websites were just automatically dimming for no reason, because this feature seemed to be triggered by all kinds of webcam movement other than the add-on’s recommended “move your hand from top to bottom” gesture.
As far as speech recognition is concerned, I have never been able to get this to work. And that’s okay, to be honest. I like to control smart home devices hands-free, but I actually think it takes less time to click the icon or turn on the dimming features of the add-on automatically when a video starts playing than it takes to tell the computer to dim a web page. because the video is about to start playing.
Do you have a Chrome or Firefox extension that you really like? Tell us about it: [email protected] .