As we pointed out last week, YouTube is now offering HD quality video on select movies. But one of the hallmarks of HD video is the widescreen aspect ratio (16:9 rather than 4:3) and now the YouTube site has been updated so that all video is now displayed in a new widescreen player.
As the YouTube blog notes, this means that the vast majority of videos on the site — which were uploaded as 4:3 — are now displayed with black bars on the sides (the empty space not used by 4:3 videos).
You might be wondering why YouTube doesn’t auto-detect a video’s aspect ration and use the appropriate player — it’s a good question, one that many YouTube users are also asking, but so far the company hasn’t commented. We suspect the change is part of a broader move to make YouTube all HD, all the time, but it seems like giving video owners the option to choose which player is used would have been a sound idea.
But now that the groundwork is in place, with both HD converters and widescreen playback now available, look for YouTube’s video quality to improve. The service has already announced plans to host full length MGM movies and that move is likely to be followed by other partnerships.
In the past it was necessary to choose between audience size and video quality — if you wanted video quality you uploaded to Vimeo or Blip.tv, both of which have long offered HD and widescreen players, but if you wanted to reach the largest audience you uploaded to YouTube. However, that’s changed, YouTube is now a viable option for those of you wouldn’t dream of downsizing your videos to the grainy, boxy format that has long been the site’s hallmark.
Unfortunately, while the widescreen player is now the default on the YouTube site, the embed code is still written for the old, 4:3 ratio player. When we posted our write up of the HD features last week a couple people wrote to ask how we embedded a widescreen video.
I’m afraid the answer is that we manually changed the dimensions in the embed code. After a bit tinkering we found sizing the video player to 630×380 worked quite well — YMMV.
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