How To: YouTube Formatting Tags
One of the frequent issues seen with online video is formatting problems in aspect ratio and display resolution. You see a lot of these problems appear on YouTube with video just not looking right. In some cases, widescreen 16:9 video is squished into a standard definition or 4:3 aspect ratio. Or you see 4:3 video stretched into a 16:9 aspect ratio. The standard practice of letterboxing transfers video shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard definition video format while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. Pillarboxing (reversed letterboxing) adds vertical black bars on each side of the video when the player a 16:9 aspect ratio. Windowboxing occurs when the video appears centered in the video player surrounded by a black frame on all four sides of the image.
yt:crop=16:9 (zooms in on the 16:9 area, removes windowboxing)
yt:stretch=16:9 (fixes anamorphic content by scaling to 16:9)
yt:stretch=4:3 (fixes 720x480 content that is the wrong aspect ratio by scaling to 4:3)
yt:quality=high (default to a high quality stream, depending on availability)
So how do you fix this problem with new videos or ones you've already uploaded to YouTube?
YouTube developed a series of specific tags you can add to your video that let you to alter the appearance and format of your video when played on YouTube or in an embedded player. You can add these tags before you upload your video file to the site, or you can also add the tags to edit an existing video that you've uploaded to your account in the past. The video's altered appearance will display when the video plays on YouTube, and in embedded players.
To use them simply copy and paste the code of the hint tags below into the tags section of the video you want to fix:
yt:crop=16:9 (zooms in on the 16:9 area, removes windowboxing)
yt:stretch=16:9 (fixes anamorphic content by scaling to 16:9)
yt:stretch=4:3 (fixes 720x480 content that is the wrong aspect ratio by scaling to 4:3)
yt:quality=high (default to a high quality stream, depending on availability)
See the detailed instructions on The YouTube Help page Learn More: Formatting tags
Posted by larrykless at 9/26/2009 10:39 PM 
Categories: Best Practices,Online Video Publishing,Online Video,Content Creation,How To,YouTube,Web video
Tags: Formatting online video sites Online Video Publishing YouTube Content Creation Aspect ratio Players encoding Online Video How To Tips Web Video
Categories: Best Practices,Online Video Publishing,Online Video,Content Creation,How To,YouTube,Web video
Tags: Formatting online video sites Online Video Publishing YouTube Content Creation Aspect ratio Players encoding Online Video How To Tips Web Video
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Thank you so much for adding this feature. I have a lot of videos that
were artificially letterboxed, and it is great to be able to trim them. Go to the video page and click "Edit Video" under the description, or
go to "My Videos" and click "Edit" on the video in question.
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I used this method on my most popular live video ("The Librarian" video I did w/ LisaNova) and it works. Thanks for posting this.
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hello, thx for explanation of formating, we have some problems with symmetrical, would be great to see new video from you regarding this one, thx!
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Thanks for the quick fix to my first video. Haven't gone public yet, but will after I get the scrolling credits to stop looking like they have the tremors.
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