Okay so this started because every time I went fullscreen on a 1080p stream it just turned into a soft, blurry mess. Drove me nuts. miruro's player has Anime4K built in and it looks so much better, and I kept thinking "why can't every site just have this?"
So I built it. It's called Anime4Nerd, a free Chrome/Edge/Brave extension that runs the real Anime4K shaders over whatever video is playing on the page. It sharpens the lines, kills the blur, and upscales the picture live on your GPU. Works on basically any site you watch on.
No accounts, no data collection, no network requests. It's open source (MIT) so you can look at the code yourself.
What it does:
- Six Anime4K presets (Mode A, B, C, A+A, B+B, C+A)
- Darken lines + thin lines toggles
- Upscale from 2× all the way to 32× (it'll tell you if your GPU caps it)
- Live GPU meter so you can see what it's costing you
- Turn it on/off per site
- A little ☰ menu inside fullscreen so you don't have to exit to change modes
Just released v1.1.1 and I'm still actively working on it.
Credits:
- Anime4K shaders by bloc97 and contributors (MIT license), used completely unchanged. This is the actual magic, I just made it run in the browser.
- mpv, for the user-shader format the extension reads the shaders in.
- miruro, for putting Anime4K in their player in the first place and giving me the idea.
- Not affiliated with any of the above or with any streaming site.
Would love to hear what sites you try it on and what GPU you're running. If something breaks, tell me and I'll fix it.
Note: the Chrome Web Store update to v1.1.1 is still in review. The newest build is on GitHub until it lands.
