YouTube Widescreen Player

[Update 12/04/08: YouTube now allows for HD streaming. and
YouTube has enabled Widescreen embeds.

Updated 11/24/08: YouTube defaults to 16:9 player format, but what does that mean for the web video industry?]

YouTube’s been going under some mega changes so far this year and now they’ve updated their new player to resize itself to true widescreen resolution. For right now that only pro’s that I can notice between the new widescreen player versus the older player is that if there are widescreen black bars the majority of them will be cut off.

Is this really all that newsworthy? I say no, but the question is why does YouTube find it necessary to release a widescreen format player? There’s got to be something else that this new form of a player can offer that the old one didn’t. Hopefully they’ll let us know what exactly that is soon enough.

Right now because their new player does not embed onto third party sites we can’t show you the differences directly within this post. You can see an example here. Make sure to turn on and off the old/new player to see the differences.

YouTube Widescreen Player

I’m good at photoshop.

Author: DaveWeLike

I'm the editor of StuffWeLike.com.

17 thoughts on “YouTube Widescreen Player”

  1. Hey David,

    I was looking for a way to embed the widescreen player eariler and I came across your post. I thought you might be interested to know that I actually found a way to embed it. The details are on my site.

    Will

  2. I noticed that widescreen will be enabled if you add &fmt=18 at the end of the video url.

    The bad thing about &fmt=18 is, it will take some times to load for a PC with slow internet connection.

    &fmt=18 also means high quality video viewing (and widescreen supported).

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  5. Youtube seem to constantly add new features just for the sake of it, with a lot of them serving no decent purpose. A widescreen option is a good idea i guess, but 99.9% of videos on the site are 4:3, so why make it the default? It just means pretty much all videos have annoying black spaces either side

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