RSSWhat YouTube's new 16:9 aspect ratio means for users
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 25, 2008, 11:03 AM
There are some significant and some insignificant aspects of YouTube's adjusted main screen. The service's "embrace" of widescreen today, we discovered, doesn't change much besides what you see on the surface.
A number of videos with 16:9 widescreen ratio have already been featured on YouTube, and long-time users with widescreen monitors know that YouTube already supported that ratio whenever a video is expanded to full screen mode. Movie trailers are among the content that YouTube has supported in their native aspect ratios.
Until yesterday, the size of that content on YouTube's main player page has been "letterboxed" to fit within a 4:3 box -- one with a CRT's aspect ratio. Now, YouTube is reversing which videos it chooses to "letterbox," by presenting its main page with a bigger 16:9 display. From this point on in the main page, videos in the 4:3 ratio are displayed with black borders along the left and right sides, though without shrinking them any smaller than they had been displayed before. But uploaded videos with 16:9 aspect ratio will be displayed within a larger area.
That's on the main page, at least for now, we discovered. For users with their own private channels, we found that videos remain featured in the 4:3 aspect ratio. Meanwhile, some of the commercial channels on YouTube had already begun implementing widescreen viewing options over a month ago.
The methodology for embedding videos within other pages also remains the same. This morning, we noticed the default values that YouTube provides when writing its automatic HTML <object> code remain width = "425" height = "344", even for videos that are natively widescreen. Coders may, of course, change these default values to suit their own pages.
What YouTube's switch cannot change, unfortunately, is the situation where widescreen videos were changed to 4:3 aspect ratio prior to their having been uploaded...in order that they could fit within the 4:3 viewer YouTube originally provided by default. Today, we noticed that such reworked videos appear with black borders all around them, as YouTube now adds letterboxing on the "wings," if you will, in addition to those along the top and bottom that were already present.
YouTube's behavior when expanding videos to full screen does not appear to have changed; the system still expands the video to fit the size of your monitor as best it can.
The new widescreen format really looks it's best on a Mac.
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|Lol...As I have said many many times...Not even worth the energy.
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|You really suck at trolling. Try not to make your posts so stupid and obvious, or better yet get a life.
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|whats the diff between 16:9 and 16:10
I wonder what my 24" HD LCD PC moniter is? how can I tell? the box doesnt say anything about that.
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|If your 24-inch monitor has a native resolution of 1900x1200 then you likely have a 16:10 aspect ratio monitor. This means that when you watch 1080p content you will still see thin black bars above and below the picture. This is assuming your monitor doesn't automatically do a vertical stretch to eliminate the black bars.
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|"then you likely have a 16:10"
You have a 16:10.
A list of common resolutions and their associated aspect ratios
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|16:10 most likely.
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|Divide your TV/Monitor's maximum Horizontal lines by your maximum Vertical lines (example: 1680 x 1050). A total around 1.77-1.78 is a 16:9. A total around 1.58-1.60 is a 16:10. You can verify this by simply dividing 16 by 9 (1.77) and 16 by 10 (1.6). Very little difference regardless.
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|Haha! Class choice of clip in the third picture.
Now, what I've never got to the bottom of is why there are so many combinations of aspect ratios and PARs (pixel aspect ratios) when it comes to films.
Laptop screens are (on the whole) 16:10, but movies are generally 16:9, and TVs are luck of the draw.
Has anyone ever come across a guide that sets out what to use in what scenario?
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|My 22" LCD monitor is 16:10 as well.
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|Get 16:10 @ 1920x1200 (or better if you can afford) and don't worry about it, because you won't be losing any data.
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|I would say 98% of the monitors on the market right now, are 16:10. There are the odd few that are 16:9 and it's rare now to see 4:3 monitors being sold in stores, as oppose to 5 years ago where it was a pretty good 50/50 selection of both. Same thing goes for televisions, but instead of 16:10, they're 16:9.
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|Most movies on bluray ive seen are not 16:9.
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|YouTube said they have the original videos that were uploaded, right? If those don't have the black borders for 4:3 size they should reconvert them as requested (or using an algorithm to determine which videos suffer from this problem).
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