Jason Dunn
11-26-2008, 02:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-space-for-youtube-videos.html' target='_blank'>http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/20...ube-videos.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1227659403.usr1.jpg" border="1" /></p><p>A mere 15 days after I uploaded my first wide-screen video and asked YouTube to release a 16:9 aspect ratio player, they implemented it. Am I good or what? For my next feat, I'll be asking for 10,000 shares of Google stock for $1. ;-) OK, back to reality: YouTube has obviously been working on this for a while now, and it's nice to see tha they finally implemented it. Unfortunately they're not doing smart detection of the content - meaning the 99.9% of all the videos on YouTube that are in 4:3 aspect ratio will be displayed with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiJXYIlgm8M" target="_blank">big black bars on the right and left</a>. Worse still, if you hard-rendered a 16:9 video to fit in 4:3 like I did with two of my videos, you end up with big black bars on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC_5zZ7SfNI" target="_blank">top, bottom, left, and right</a>. Yuck! Still, at least all the 16:9 videos I'm shooting are much bigger on the YouTube page. It's great to see YouTube making this change. It still pales in quality to what I'm seeing with <a href="http://www.motionbox.com" target="_blank">Motionbox</a>, but there are <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10104182-2.html" target="_blank">some quality hacks</a> out there that can improve the quality.</p><p>My headache now is trying to figure out the best video deployment strategy - I use the incredibly awesome <a href="http://www.tubemogul.com" target="_blank">TubeMogul</a> to distribute my videos to 11 different video sharing sites at once, but many of them have 100 MB limits on the upload, so I might have to start uploading two different versions of my video - three if you count the one I upload to Motionbox. Talk about a headache...the things I do to bring you guys awesome quality videos! ;-)</p>