Dear YouTube, I heart your video player
Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 03:13PM A few days ago, a wonderful change took place on a website I frequent. YouTube took the leap to a widescreen player!
For as long as I have been in production, I have been a huge video player geek. One of my MOs at CNET News.com was to get a better video player for the site, because I really felt it affects the viewer experience. You can have video gold, but in a horrid player, it will never get the chance it deserves.
I have seen other sites have great players, like Revision3, Mevio, Hulu, and CNET TV. I also love how everyone is allowing HD uploads, including one of my faves, Vimeo. Let's hope this upping of the bar at YouTube inspires every video provider to step it up. The only thing I am wondering is if embedding in widescreen is possible. I don't think you can yet, but would be a great added feature.
In any case, congratulations YouTube on your new super snazzy video player!
CNET TV, Hulu, Mevio, Revision3, Video Player, Widescreen, YouTube in Ramblings, Websites
Reader Comments (4)
I'm glad to see it, but it leaves us stuck with boxing issues now. All of the stuff I've shot in the last two years (like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj-7ElP2E7o) was in 16:9 to begin with, so now it appears in a goofy box on all sides.
I am a big fan of Vimeo though. I think their uploader is very sweet.
I went to Vimeo, because it has much better quality years ago. Plus I find better content, Youtube is filled with crap viral videos & has has very choppy output. I tried viddler, but their speed to convert something moved me away from them. I try spend at least a few hours a week wandering around Vimeo finding great content.
Concerning the embedding, I saw it somewhere (either on a sub YouTube Channel or on a forum) but the video isn't square either, it's more wide. Slightly. It's not as huge as the main video but I believe it is indeed wider.
whenever I need to embed a widescreen video I change the code you get from youtube to the correct amount of pixels. If i'm not mistaken I ended up with 640x386 to get the correct ratio.
If you would like to embed a video with higher quality, Wired.com has an excellent article about it here:
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Watch_Higher_Quality_YouTube_Videos
catch you on the flip side!