Dan Herbert's

One of the things that really bothers me about Adobe Flash’s fullscreen mode is that it is very unfriendly to people with dual monitors. This problem stems from a stubborn “security concern” on Adobe’s part, which makes very little sense to me.

I understand the security implications of allowing flash to take over your entire screen. Adobe’s fullscreen mode rules are, for the most part, very well grounded in good security practices; however, for a dual-monitor system, this issue is not a security concern, it is a usability problem. Flash should not need to have focus to allow fullscreen mode when there are 2 or more monitors on a system.

All complaining aside, this issue has led me to explore alternatives to let me watch YouTube videos in fullscreen mode while doing something else on another monitor simultaneously. There is the hacker way of fixing this, which involves editing the flash plugin’s binary with a hex editor. This is too much trouble for me and most people, I’m sure.

Since I really only watch flash videos on YouTube, I only needed to have YouTube videos go fullscreen. This would be easy enough, I’d just need to get the URL of the .swf file and put it into the URL and flash makes the video expand to the size of the screen. The problem with this arises when you try to do this with YouTube’s new “shows” section.

Due to licensing, TV shows & movies on YouTube aren’t allowed to be embedded in other sites. As a result, pasting the direct SWF url into your browser makes YouTube think the video is embedded into another site and denies access to the video.

A better option is to use another one of YouTube’s new features, a video popup.

This popup page allows any YouTube video to be embedded. You just need to add a YouTube video’s 11-character unique video code to the URL of this popup page and you can watch any YouTube video. To make this effortless to do, I’ve created a bookmarklet that does all of the hardwork for you. Just add the link below to your bookmarks, and while watching a YouTube video, click this bookmarklet:

YouTube Fullscreen bookmarklet

Just click this bookmarklet while watching a YouTube video and you’ll be switched to the popup version of the video. To make it fullscreen, press the fullscreen key in your browser of choice (F11 on most browsers) to get a useful fullscreen experience.

Now I can watch Star Trek while doing productive things on my second monitor!