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:stretch=16:9 (fixes anamorphic content by scaling to 16:9)
yt:stretch=4:3 (fixes 720×480 content that is the wrong aspect ratio by scaling to 4:3)
yt:quality=high (default to a high quality stream, depending on availability)
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.
I used this method on my most popular live video (“The Librarian” video I did w/ LisaNova) and it works. Thanks for posting this.
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.
It worked on most of my older music vids, making them full screen- but on 3 it didn’t – but SAME movies were used for clips with ones that worked (Wuthering Heights and P & P) – w/ same type file (mpg).
I’ve been trying (since they were made available) to add that tag —
“yt:crop=16:9” — to almost all my videos uploaded before December,
since the format change left them all “window-boxed.” In other words,
I had letterboxed my version to make it fit the old 4:3 ratio player,
and when the 16:9 player came along, suddenly all my videos were
swimming in a sea of black.
The video’s altered appearance will display when the video plays on YouTube, and in embedded players.
I have been searching for some information about the Youtube formatting tags almost an hour. You helped me a lot indeed and reading this your entry I have found many new and useful information about this question.