In this tutorial, you are going to know how to watch online video with dark background using a simple Chrome extension. Apart from Chrome, it is also available as an extension for other browsers, such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, Edge, Yandex, etc. This extension named Turn Off The Lights will help you dim the background to dark or a color of your choice. This way, you can concentrate solely on the video you are watching. You can choose the level of dimness and set a specific time period after which the background would be dimmed. Apart from this, you can also use this extension to create atmospheric effect around a video and enjoy features like video detection and night mode.
Lets gets started with the basic interface and working mechanism of this extension.
This is the icon which you can see next to the address bar of Chrome, once you install the extension. If you want to watch online video with dark background, simply click on the icon and video background will be dimmed.
If you wish to customize your experience, you can right click on the icon and access its Options menu.
Using these Chrome extensions, you can Play YouTube videos in Loop.
Options Available In this Extension To Watch Online Video With Dark Background
Basics
In the menu of Basic options, you can customize the color, background, and opacity of background depending on your preference. If you watch YouTube regularly, you can select the auto play option from the Basics menu, which will automatically dim the lights when a video is playing, and then brighten up the screen, when the video has ended. Apart from that, you can add URLs to the whitelist and blacklist category. You can specify which video websites’ background would be darkened and which ones will not be darkened.
Visual Effects
The option in Visual Effects menu will help to give you more enhanced and better viewing experience. In this segment, you can customize the area around the video with atmospheric light of your choice for a more enhanced viewing experience. The atmospheric lighting gives a certain glow around video and makes video look better. The properties of atmospheric lighting can be changed as well. You can change color properties, blur radius, opacity, and more. You can also whitelist URLs to use atmosphere lighting effect.
Advanced Options
In this section various options are provided which gives you much more control over settings. You can adjust the volume of your videos with mouse scrolls, add filter to current video, replay the current video, take a screenshot, and much more. You can also set up a screen saver to automatically dim background when certain high resolution pages open.
Night Mode
The Night Mode button appears at the bottom of every page. You can click on its symbol to activate it. This mode also lets you set a timer. The timer darkens video background of all web pages automatically within specific time period. You can of course use exceptions to the rule through the blacklist and whitelist options.
Additional Features That Did Not Work
There are Camera Motion and Speech Recognition features available, but they did not work. The Camera Motion option lets you activate dark background for video on any website when you slide your hand in a top down motion in front of the camera. You can choose this action for all websites or for only specific websites as per your wish.
The Speech Recognition feature says you can tell this extension which functions you would like to perform. You can tell it either to turn off or turn on dark video background, Pause, Play video, etc. The speech recognition is available in many different languages apart from English. These languages are Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, etc.
Although these features sound very exciting, but didn’t work during my testing. I was really very excited to use these features, but after setting things up, they did not work without showing any error message.
Verdict
Turn Off the Lights is a very useful extension, which can enhance any video viewing experience. One good thing about this tool is that you can begin using it as provided with basic options to watch videos with dark background. Or, you can play around with advanced settings to customize various dark background properties. There are some features which did not work, such as the camera motion detection and speech recognition, which was a let down.
