Change log

Simplified Settings panel. Refresh account, sign out, reset appearance and open website buttons have been removed from Settings — sign in/out is now handled by the header icon, and the website / feedback links live in the footer.

Feedback link in the footer of the extension, left of the Privacy Policy. It opens the Browser Filters feedback page with your extension version attached.

Robust toolbar handshake. Clicking the toolbar icon now pings the page first, injects the content script only when it is genuinely missing, then sends a single acknowledged toggle. Double clicks are swallowed by a short per-tab lock, so the panel opens or closes exactly once per click.

Send feedback button in Settings opens the Browser Filters feedback page in a new tab, with your extension version attached.

Far more reliable YouTube detection. The extension now targets the real #movie_player video instead of hover previews, Shorts carousels, thumbnails, or 1x1 tracking videos, so filters apply consistently on every watch page.

Videos mounted inside open shadow roots are now discovered, fixing players that previously looked "invisible" to the extension.

SPA navigation on YouTube (watch → Shorts → miniplayer) and ad/source swaps now trigger an immediate re-detect and re-apply, so grades no longer silently drop between videos.

Sign-out now asks for confirmation. A themed modal fades the panel background and simply asks, "Are you sure you want to sign out?" before clearing the session and handing you back to the web app.

Header sign-in / sign-out icon now sits to the left of the gear. One click signs you in when you are logged out, or signs you out and hands you back to the web app for a clean re-authentication when you are signed in.

Licence and account status stay in sync with the new header icon, so the same sign-in/out flow works whether you use the Settings panel or the header shortcut.

Update awareness. The extension now reports the version Chrome actually has installed (never a number from the website), and any BVF page tells it what the latest published version is. If yours is older you get a clear notice — “A new version of Video Filters is available…” — plus an Update button that triggers Chrome's own update check. Major-version jumps (4.x → 5.x) still require a fresh sign-in; minor and patch updates keep you signed in.

Sign out & sign back in from Settings does a clean authentication refresh: the old session, cached account, licence and synced filters are wiped, then your account, email, licence number, Free/Paid status and feature access are re-pulled fresh on sign-in — no stale Pro or Free state can linger.

Saved filters now follow your account. Any BVF page you have open — not just the Connect page — pushes your account filters into the extension, so signing in on a second computer restores My Filters automatically. Saving while signed in stores to your account (previously only Pro accounts synced), and device-only filters can be moved up with a one-tap “Upload to my account” button.

Colour overlay animations now apply only to the two-colour gradient and 4-corner styles. A solid wash has nothing to animate between, so the Animation control is disabled for it and the overlay paints static.

Vocals only mix — a slider under the Vocals only toggle that blends the processed vocal band back against the original voice. 100% is the full morph, 0% leaves the voice untouched, so you can dial in a natural balance instead of an all-or-nothing effect.

Vocals only — a toggle under Voice filters that restricts the voice character to the centre vocal band (170 Hz – 5.2 kHz). Bass and air bypass the morph untouched, so music and room tone stay clean while only the voice is re-shaped.

Exposure now composites through the same overlay path and opacity control the colour overlay uses instead of compounding an extra brightness pass, so dragging Exposure no longer rebuilds the whole video filter chain. The control looks and sits exactly where it did.

The tab speaker icon is now driven only by the idle gate: nothing — including the volume boost — can resume audio processing while no routed video is actually playing.

Voice characters trimmed from thirty to fifteen genuinely distinct ones. Chipmunk and Deep Voice 1 are now the two extremes (+9 and −7 semitones with matching formant shaping) so they sound nothing alike. Retired voices map onto their closest match, so saved presets keep working.

Duplicate extension panels are gone. The content script could be injected a second time, which spawned a second panel plus a second set of listeners, drag handlers and processing — the single biggest source of runaway CPU. Only one panel and one processing instance can now exist per page.

Dragging a slider no longer floods the browser. Every pixel of a drag used to write to extension storage, which broadcast a change event and re-applied every filter to every video dozens of times a second. Writes are now batched while the on-screen value stays instant.

Audio actually works now. Two different parts of the extension were each trying to claim the video's audio stream, and the second one silently failed — which is why audio styles, voice characters and AI stem separation often did nothing. They now share a single audio pipeline.

The tab speaker icon no longer lights up when nothing is playing. Audio processing is suspended whenever no video routed through the extension is actually playing.

Clarity is no longer secretly expensive: it used to switch on a per-pixel sharpening convolution above 40%, which is why it crawled. It is now pure tone math — use the Sharpen slider when you want real convolution.

A lightweight performance indicator lives in Settings: green for normal, yellow when things slow down, red when the system is overloaded. It only warns — your controls are never disabled.

Overlay animations trimmed from twelve to six that actually look different: Breathe, Blink, Pulse, Rotate, Rotate fast and Sway. Older saved presets migrate automatically.

The power button is a switch again — turning the extension back on no longer wipes your filters, which is what made it look like the extension had turned itself on with different settings.

A full reset now really is full: output scale returns to Native and vision strength resets, alongside filters, overlay (back to Solid wash), texture, frame and playback.

The colour bar now has a frame and a little more breathing room from the Save button, with a Colour wheel border toggle in Settings to turn the frame off.

Everything called an “effect” is now called a filter. My Effects is My Filters, the Shared Effects Library is the Shared Filters Library, and every saved or shared look reads as a Filter across the website and the extension.

Page headers and content are now centered and aligned consistently across the website.

AI stem separation rebuilt on complementary 24 dB/oct crossovers (bass under 160 Hz, vocals 160 Hz–5 kHz, drum transients above 5 kHz, music on the sides). The old bands overlapped, which double-counted energy and comb-filtered into a hissy artefact behind the audio — and meant pulling a stem to zero never fully removed it.

Audio no longer stutters the video: the stem tree is physically unwired whenever stems are untouched, saturation only oversamples on heavy drive, and filter moves are ramped instead of stepped so nothing clicks.

Core filters are much lighter: brightness, contrast, saturation and hue from every tone control are folded into one pass each instead of stacking a new GPU pass per control, so many filters plus overlay, blend and animation stay smooth together.

Color Overlay animations now include Rotate, Rotate fast, Sway and Rotate + fade. Rotation spins the gradient itself, so it shines on 2-color and Four-corner overlays while still compositing correctly through every Blend mode.

The directional fades were replaced by a single slow Fade in / out loop that breathes up and back down (slower than Blink), plus an extra-slow variant. Older saved presets migrate automatically.

Saved overlay colours now render on the real page exactly as the panel shows them: reused overlay layers are fully reset between paints, so a leftover texture or mask can no longer bleed into the colour layer, and Blend mode plus Animation restart cleanly the moment a colour is saved.

Color Overlay slots are now solid colour blocks that always show exactly the colour you picked, and tapping a swatch reliably applies to the selected slot — the swatch bar no longer captures the pointer and swallows the click.

Color Overlay now starts in Solid mode, updates each Solid, Two-color and Four-corner slot immediately, and keeps selected colors, blend mode, animation and opacity synchronized with the actual video. The color strip is more compact and the Save control now matches the toggle height with comfortable spacing.

Picking a Color Overlay swatch now always lands on the selected slot. A tiny finger/mouse wobble on the swatch bar used to be treated as a drag and the tap was thrown away, so Top left (and every other slot) kept its old colour.

A Save button now sits to the right of the colour bar. It re-commits the overlay colours and forces the video to repaint, so a colour can never look stuck.

Picking a colour for the Color Overlay now actually repaints the video in every mode. Solid, 2-point gradient and 4-corner overlays were being erased right after they were drawn, so the swatches looked like they did nothing.

The whole website now uses the same black glass surface as the extension's Glass theme.

The extension now opens on the tab that suits you: Pro users land on Filters, free users land on Playback. Remember last tab still wins whenever a previous tab was saved.

The changelog is now an accordion. The current release is expanded and every older milestone (3.0, 3.1, 3.2 …) sits collapsed until you open it.

Color overlay colours now come from one shared bar of 40 swatches — every hue in a true value plus a lighter tint, followed by white, silver, slate and black. The bar scrolls sideways and can be dragged left or right.

Blend modes now actually work. Overlay layers are grouped with the video itself, so Soft Light, Overlay, Multiply, Screen and the rest visibly change the picture in both the web player and the extension.

Admin-only Extension UI sandbox in the dashboard — renders the real extension panel with live CSS overrides, width/height sizing and a Pro/Free toggle for styling work.

Pricing rebalanced: Playback + Frame and the whole Looks library are free for everyone; Core Filters and Audio are now BVF Pro.

Free users land on the Looks tab by default in the extension, with a clear upgrade shield on the Pro tabs.

Every core filter now has two gauges — the top one sets the value, the thinner one below sets how much of that filter is mixed in (0–100%).

Color Overlay and Texture moved into the Filters tab, so the whole grade lives on one page and two tabs are gone.

Presets now capture Color Blindness, Frame, Multi-Color FX, Highlight and per-filter mix — switching presets resets anything the preset doesn't carry back to None / default.

Powering the extension on always starts from a clean slate: filters, overlay, texture, effect, vision correction and frame reset to default.

Reset all button at the top of the Filters tab restores the entire look in one click.

All audio controls — styles, boost, isolation, ducking, EQ, noise reduction, AI stems and voice effects — live on a single Audio page.

Background music swap has been removed from both the extension and the dashboard. Most sites serve audio without CORS headers, so the replacement track could not be reliably mixed into the tab.

Verified the AI stem mixer end to end. Muting Vocals drops centre-panned dialogue by ~24 dB, muting Music drops stereo-panned instruments by ~36 dB, and Bass and Drums isolate cleanly. Note that engaging the stem mixer sums the tab to mono by design.

New Settings & Appearance tab in the extension. Switch the panel between Dark, Light and Glass at any time; the choice is remembered and only changes the controls, never your filters, audio or looks.

Light mode is fully readable. Every surface, border, label and link is now themed, and the panel was audited so no text falls below a 3:1 contrast ratio against its background.

Glass mode uses a blurred, saturated backdrop so the page shows through the panel while text stays legible, and the draggable panel frame now matches whichever theme you pick.

Two extras under Settings: Compact spacing tightens the whole panel, and Remember last tab reopens the panel where you left off.

The panel can now be resized from the bottom-left corner as well as the bottom-right, so panels docked against the right edge of the page can be widened without moving them first.

Fixed the admin Extension UI sandbox flipping between the Pro and Free layouts. The preview is now pinned to the Pro build in a single stable state.

The extension is now called Browser Filters — Cinematic Looks & Audio Filters.

Core Filters redesigned: every filter shows its value gauge on the left and its opacity gauge on the right, side by side instead of stacked.

Effects and Texture moved into the Filters tab, and the separate Effects tab is gone. Picking an effect now loads an editable default — tweak the sliders, then save it under your own name and the picker shows that name.

Color overlay layers now blend against the page itself, so Blend modes finally change the picture instead of doing nothing.

Vision corrections have a strength slider, so a colour-blindness correction can be dialled in partially instead of all-or-nothing.

Looks tab reorganised: a Default looks dropdown and search sit at the top, your saved presets sit directly underneath, and a highlighted link to the full web library sits at the bottom.

Settings & Appearance adds rounded or sharp corners, a borders on/off switch, and a colour picker for sliders, switches and buttons.

Fifteen more voice characters, including Movie Announcer, ASMR, Stadium PA, Walkie-Talkie and Opera Hall.

The Audio tab now states plainly that AI stem separation may not work on every site, since some sites serve audio without CORS headers.

The "save this edited effect" box is gone from the Filters tab. Saving a look is one thing now: name it as a preset on the Looks tab.

Saved presets are easier to read: the preset name sits on its own line above full-width Apply, Edit name and Delete buttons.

Name this preset and Save moved directly under the Default looks picker, so saving is where you already are.

The control colour picker now actually recolours sliders, switches, chips and buttons, has four more presets (Rose, Blue, Coral, Lime) and its own Save button.

The video status line now sits above the Player and Reset buttons so it is never clipped.

Overlay and texture blend layers now follow the video into fullscreen instead of being left behind on the page.

Performance watchdog: BVF samples real frame pacing while a video plays, automatically drops the most expensive passes when the page cannot keep up, and shows a "remove a few filters" notice instead of letting the picture stall or go blank.

Effects and film recipes moved to the very top of the Filters tab. Picking one loads an editable starting point; every slider underneath stays yours to tweak.

Fixed the effects dropdown rendering as a blank white strip. Grouped menus are now themed like the rest of the panel.

Vision (colour blindness) now lives inside the Filters tab and is free for everyone, even without Pro. The separate Vision tab is gone.

Saved presets are now called My effects, and each row fits on one line: name, Apply, Edit, Delete.

On the Looks tab the search box, Recent / Popular sort and the Default looks picker sit together on one line, and the Default looks list is identical to the one in Core Filters. Nothing loads into the list until you search or pick something.

Audio can be saved as its own preset, kept completely separate from visual looks so the two can never conflict.

Live CSS overrides moved into Settings & Appearance, so the panel can be restyled from inside the extension.

The control colour now paints the slider knob only, not the whole track, and applies consistently on every tab. A gear icon next to Compare jumps straight to Settings.

Four tabs on a single line: Filters, Audio, My Looks and Playback. Settings & Appearance left the tab strip — the gear icon in the header opens it.

The Tabs panel (this site + open tabs with video) moved to the bottom of Playback, and Playback is now free for everyone.

Core Filters lost its redundant heading: Reset all now sits directly to the right of the effects picker.

Colour overlay dropped the Solid / Gradient switch. Both colours sit on one line and start on the same colour, so blend modes always have something to blend.

Colour bar is easier to read and use: bigger swatches with clearer selection rings, a "Please drag to the right or left" hint on hover, and the Save button shrunk to toggle size so the colours have room.

Choosing a default look from the dropdown now also drops it into My effects below, ready to tweak, rename or re-apply.

Playback settings save with a preset and always return to their defaults when no preset is active.

Toggle switches read correctly at a glance: the track turns white and only the knob takes your control colour.

The panel drags freely anywhere on the page, including far off any edge, and the drag keeps going when the cursor leaves the window or crosses onto a second screen. Only a sliver of the title bar has to stay reachable so it can always be pulled back.

Double-click the panel's title bar to snap it back to the middle of the screen if it was parked out of sight, and resizing the browser window can no longer strand it off-screen.

Toggle switches use one solid control colour across the track and knob, with a bold "BF" label on the knob so the on state reads instantly.

New tab button sits to the right of Reset at the top of the panel, opening the video you are watching in its own tab.

New icon: a bold "BF" film-strip mark in the Browser Filters pink, clean and readable at toolbar size.

The Open in new tab button now sits clearly to the right of Player and Reset at the top of the panel.

The panel background is one consistent colour instead of fading light to dark as you scroll.

Glass theme is genuinely see-through again: the page behind shows through a single frosted layer rather than a stacked tint.

The BF mark now appears in the extension header and the in-page panel bar, with the blue variant used across the website.

The sandboxed Extension UI preview is rebuilt from the shipped extension source, so the preview and the installed Chrome extension are always identical.

Version 4.0 release build. The extension, the packaged ZIP and this changelog all ship on 4.2.2, so Chrome reliably picks up the update.

Text-only BROWSER FILTERS wordmark in the panel header with the "Cinematic looks and audio filters" subtitle underneath.

Voice effects actually work now. The character morph was only shaping a thin, heavily diluted vocal band — it now sits on the whole signal, so every preset is clearly audible.

Real pitch shifting. Chipmunk, Helium, Giant, Demon, Deeper and friends now shift pitch with a realtime granular shifter instead of EQ alone, so they finally sound like their names.

Turning on a voice effect now switches audio processing on for you — no more silent effects because the master audio switch was still off.

Processed audio stays in stereo. The stem engine used to collapse everything into a phasey mono sum, which is why processing sounded one-sided with a hollow artefact behind it. Centre stems now sit centred and side stems are re-widened to both ears.

AI stem separation is accurate again: the drums fader now controls both the wide and centre transient bands instead of leaking centre drums through at full level.

The high-frequency whine behind processed audio is gone. The granular pitch shifter is now fully detached and hard-zeroed whenever no pitch shift is in use, instead of being left summed in at a residual gain.

Audio style and Voice character both start on None, so noise reduction, stems, EQ and voice effects can each be used on their own or combined, without a style or character quietly stacking on top.

Big audio performance fix. The pitch shifter is only built when a shift is actually used, the saturation stage is bypassed at zero drive, and audio settings are only re-written when they change — turning audio on no longer stutters video playback.

Saved effects in the extension now have a Share action next to Edit name, with the tooltip “Add to the library and cannot be deleted.” Sharing is always explicit — nothing you save is published on its own.

Sharing from the extension saves the effect to your account and publishes it in one step, then reports the permanent EFX code back into the effect row.

Color overlay can now paint all four corners of the video with four different colors, still rotatable with the angle slider.

Overlay animations: fade in, fade out, fade left, fade right, fade from below, fade to the bottom, blink slow, blink slow x2, blink fast, blink fast x2 and pulse.

Overlay colors are now picked from one shared 18-color palette of true values (real pink, real blue, real green, real orange) instead of a free-form color picker, so blend modes and animations stay predictable.

Blend mode works again. Overlay layers are mounted alongside the video itself, so mix-blend-mode composites against the video instead of the page behind it.

The sandboxed Extension UI preview is regenerated from the shipped extension source on every build, so it can never drift from the installed extension again.

Audio style and Voice character now visibly include None in both the website and extension. Style EQ and dynamics are stronger and more distinct, and every extension character now has its own working formant and pitch profile instead of later choices falling back to the same sound.

Every effect now has both a name and a unique effect code (for example EFX-4K7Q2). The code is stored with the effect and shown everywhere, on the website and in the extension.

Search by name or by effect code. The extension search bar and the website library both match either, so a specific effect can always be found.

Share action on every saved effect, right next to Edit name. Sharing adds the effect to the Shared Effects Library permanently — shared effects can no longer be deleted or removed from the library.

Saved effects rows now read Apply, Edit name, Share, Delete, with the effect code under the name.

Shared Looks is now the Shared Effects Library, and every look is called an effect (Kodak Warm effect, Neon Noir effect) across the website and the extension.

Single-tab mode — the extension now runs on only one tab at a time (the one you last opened the popup on). Every other tab is fully idle, freeing CPU / GPU across the whole browser.

In-page play button responds on the first click — click handler moved to capture-phase so YouTube / Vimeo can no longer swallow the toggle before BVF sees it.

"Unsupported video" badge — when a site blocks BVF from controlling playback (DRM streams, encrypted sources), a small badge explains it instead of silently doing nothing.

Frosted glass look on the in-page player — bar, brand pill, and center play button now use blurred translucency to match the website's studio feel.

Fullscreen performance — overlay layout writes are skipped when the video's bounds haven't changed, cutting paint churn on mutation-heavy sites (YouTube, TikTok, IG).

Highlight Color merged into Multi-Color FX with a single On / Off switch — one place to add tinted washes instead of two overlapping blocks.

Extension UI repainted to match the website — monochrome black / white / gray palette across the popup and in-page player, replacing the old violet / cyan brand accents.

Tab chips, sliders, dropdowns, and toggles in the popup now share the exact same look as the dashboard for a single consistent theme.

In-page player chrome (toolbar, settings popover, badges) restyled to the new neutral palette for less visual noise over the video.

Fixed in-page player on YouTube / Vimeo / Netflix — capture-phase pointer + mousedown handlers now stop the site from hijacking BVF button clicks (volume, fullscreen, PiP, new tab, popout were all collapsing into play/pause).

Download button in the in-page BVF player — direct download for any non-DRM .mp4 / .webm source; clearly explains why YouTube/Netflix blob streams can't be saved.

Open in new tab / popout now detects blob: streams (YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo) and falls back to opening the original page instead of a black window.

Frame → Vignette slider now actually renders — the corner darkening was wired in the popup but the content script wasn't applying it.

Chrome Web Store listing is live — one-click install from /install (manual .zip kept as fallback).

Multi-Color FX — pick a color per edge (top / bottom / left / right) with intensity + blend mode; mirrored in the extension.

Extension popup tabs verified end-to-end — Filters, Effects, Overlays, Textures, Edges, Vision, Playback, Frame, Tabs, Presets all switch and persist via chrome.storage.

Two-way sync between dashboard, extension popup, and the in-page player — every slider change debounces to chrome.storage and reflects everywhere instantly.

YouTube / Vimeo / Netflix click-through fixed — fullscreen .bvf-hit overlay hides and BVF controls drop pointer-events when the toolbar is collapsed so native UI works.

Player toggle now reloads the active tab so the BVF player cleanly takes over or hands the page back to the site's native player.

Manifest trimmed — removed unused activeTab / tabs permissions to satisfy Chrome Web Store review (Purple Potassium).

Feature parity in the extension — Color Blindness, Multi-Color FX, and all film recipes available inside the popup with no paywall.

Saved Looks moved into the left studio sidebar — always one click away, never in the scroll path.

Slots trimmed from 3 → 2 — keep your two best grades pinned without clutter.

Source input now sits above the player in the left column; Core Filters stretches tall on the right and overflows past the player for one-screen grading.

Color Blindness corrections + simulations (Daltonize, Protan/Deutan/Tritan, Achromatopsia, High Contrast) wired into the player and its own card.

Film Recipes get an Intensity slider (0–200%).

Dedicated Release Notes page — cleaner home, shareable changelog.

Left studio sidebar holds every action: Reset, Revert, Save, Apply, Export, Import, Share, Perf, Theme — plus Saved Looks.

Core Filters compacted — tighter padding, slimmer sliders with − / + buttons and live percentages so the panel fits beside the player.

Smoother fullscreen playback — throttled time updates, paused animations in fullscreen, memoized texture layers.

Mobile-first responsiveness — sidebar collapses into a drawer; player, filters, and overlays restack into a single readable column.

Chrome extension v3.0 — sidebar layout, all filters, textures, overlays, and the BVF player mirrored with per-site / per-tab scopes.

24 analog textures — film grain, VHS, CRT, Light Leak, Hologram, Halftone, Glitch RGB, Anaglyph, plus 80s → 2020s decade looks.

Embed link support — paste a video URL or full <iframe src="…"> snippet from YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, Kick, Dailymotion, or any direct .mp4 / .webm.

URL-encoded shareable presets — send a full grade with a single link.