Beautiful ambient lighting for YouTube.com

Matt Kenefick
2 min readMay 19, 2020
Fullscreen demo using Ambient YouTube on 15" MacBook Pro

Ambient YouTube is an extension for Google Chrome (install here), Microsoft Edge (install here), and Mozilla Firefox (install here).

Preview of what Ambient YouTube does

The plugin adds a new icon to your YouTube videos that lets you enable/disable the ambient color feature. It’s in the toolbar next to fullscreen and looks like color swatches.

Enable Ambient YouTube mode

There are additional options in the popup panel that have some basic settings including the ability to Autoload the feature on each video, run at 60fps, and use more abrupt transitions.

Autoload: Initializes Ambient YouTube a video loads on YouTube.com

Disable Easing: Colors will not smoothly transition from previous color to newest color. Offers abrupt transitions.

60 FPS: Colors will be sampled and rendered at near 60fps during playback. Will start your CPU fan.

Ambient YouTube is a free browser extension that does not collect personal data.

Test Video #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xppH6j7ddlE
Test Video #2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC0vDKVPCrw

This plugin was original developed as a test for home ambient lighting solutions on video sources such as televisions, computer monitors, and tablets.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, let us know at info@polymermallard.com.

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Matt Kenefick

Chief Product Engineer. Frontend, Backend, Systems, Electronics, 3D Printing, Photography.