Digital Home Thoughts: YouTube Unleashes 16:9 Video Player

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 big black bars on the right and left. 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 top, bottom, left, and right. 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 Motionbox, but there are some quality hacks out there that can improve the quality.

My headache now is trying to figure out the best video deployment strategy - I use the incredibly awesome TubeMogul 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! ;-)