Noticed this morning that when viewing videos in high quality (with &fmt=1 using the new beta player that they now appear in the correct aspect ratio instead of being letterboxed as they were before:
Yep, it's been like that for nearly a month now (the HQ) but not the new video player which popped up last night. I've done some tests, and I've discovered in order to get it to play HQ automatically rather than force it into HQ ('&fmt=18') you have to upload the video height dimension from 480 upwards. Eg:
Though oh darn it, I have to encode the videos at 480 x something for it to go high quality and widescreen automatically? Most of mine are below that, but even with fmt=18 it still is a significantly better quality... but due to the size not being high enough it doesn't show the widescreen player.
...and editing again, rereading that post, the HEIGHT has to be 480? YouTube uploads take stupidly long each week, I don't want it to take forever with that high resolution videos! And the FLV converter doesn't notice when a WMV file is set to display 16:9, so I have to use MP4, and the program I use to export videos is fussy with what sizes I can export that at.... hip hip horray.
There's a handy plugin for firefox which adds a button to your bookmark bar which, on clicking while viewing a low-res video, will append the URL with the fmt=18 suffix.
I've set my Youtube to always display hi-res but it doesn't always work.
Finally YouTube have fixed the bug in their new player which squashes widescreen videos to anamorphic 4:3. Now it automatically resizes.
(High Quality mode)
I just e-mailed them about that yesterday! Good to see that its fixed, much better now.
Quote:
Hi there,
Thanks for your email.
I appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention. We're currently investigating the situation and the issue should be resolved shortly.
Thank you for your patience and I apologise for any inconvenience.
using the new beta player that they now appear in the correct aspect ratio instead of being letterboxed as they were before:
