Help with widescreen YouTube videos

I'm in the process of uploading some videos to YouTube. The format I put the videos in is "Windows Media Video 9 for Local Area Network (256 Kbps)", using the program CyberLink Power Director. It says the aspect ratio is supposedly 16:9, but it says the video stream is 320x240, which is 4:3.

When I upload them to YouTube, it changes them to 4:3, and they end up squashed. I would like them to be proper 16:9. On some YouTube videos, when you click full screen, they are the actual 16:9 ratio. Mine aren't.

Can anyone help?

I'm not a massive user of YouTube, but as far as I know - they don't show true widescreen videos do they?

What'll probably be best for you is to export your video in a 4:3 ratio (either the 320x240 or the 640x480 YouTube recommend) and change the setting somewhere in your program to "Maintain the Aspect Ratio using 'Letterbox'" or something similar.

This will then keep your widescreen video at the correct aspect ratio, but add black bars at the top and the bottom, but won't confuse YouTube...

The option on my editting software is called 'Stretch video to fill output frame size' which I always tick to prevent them being distorted.

Thats not the case now, ever since they've introduced Higher Quality videos it now encodes full 16:9 in low quality and high quality.
Eg: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1kiqtDVjPiY

To the OP, I think thats where your going wrong. The video size should be 426 x 240 in order for YouTube to recognise it's widescreen, most of the time it ignores 16:9 flags. But if you want to have a higher quality video on youtube it should be as follows:

* It should be at least be 360 in height
640 x 360 16:9
480 x 360 4:3

And the bitrate should be at least 900kbps in DivX/Xvid AVI or 528kbps in MPEG H.264. Not quite sure what you should use in WMV but I think it's more similar to 900 - 1000kbps.

I'll try and have a go at sorting out the problem. Would you recommend any good video editing software?

I find Sony Vegas Movie Studio quite good:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudio

Although I have Vegas 8, what I tend to do is edit the MPEG2 file in something called VideoRedoPlus then encode it into Xvid AVI using a free software called Gordian Knot or I encode using a converter called SUPER.

I find Vegas Pro is good too.

I use Vegas Pro. It is very good.

For a short time after the HQ option was added didn't the YT video box change to a 16:9 box rather than 4:3 with black bars when it recognised 16:9 content? Whatever happened to that nifty feature??

It did indeed:

http://www.utvtoday.co.uk/images/tvf/youtube_wsvideo.jpg

I agree it was a pretty neat feature, I think they reverted back to 4:3 video box because Related Videos graphics were just barely fitting onto the 16:9 box.

It would appear the widescreen video option is still available...

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GvkNasg_ETQ