YouTube bigs it up with widescreen player

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 27 November 2008 01:06

Business IT - Networking

Fed up with letterboxed content in YouTube? The Google subsidiary's new player presents movies in the 16:9 widescreen format.

Since its inception, YouTube has delivered videos in the old-school 4:3 format. The video sharing site has finally caught up with the shift to widescreen TVs and computer screens.

The change was announced in the YouTube blog: "Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback from you about what you'd like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That's why today we're excited to announce a bigger YouTube player."

"We're expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them."

The new player implements the 16:9 format used for TV broadcasts and by consumer widescreen video cameras. Cinematic films are still letterboxed due to the wider aspect ratio.

Existing 4:3 content is shown with black bars down the left and right edges. This leads to an unfortunate effect when playing content that was created as 16:9 and then letterboxed to retain the widescreen look in the old YouTube player, as it is now displayed with a black border on all four sides.

The pixel dimensions of the new player are 640 x 360.

The playback quality still seems to be largely dependent on the original material. Professionally produced clips are definitely watchable, but a shaky home video is never going to look very good. And when it comes to watching movie trailers, you're always going to get better quality from the studios' QuickTime versions.

YouTube recently introduced two new viewing modes for certain longer videos. 'Lights Off' greys out the page content other than the video itself (a technique used by many web sites to help focus attention on videos or other content), while 'Theatre View' also adds red curtains to promote that cinema experience.