I bet your thinking- what on earth is that 16:9 screenshot doing with a youtube play bar at the bottom of it. Good news! Youtube has converted it’s player to a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio to fill the growing demand from content producers. I have to admit the few videos I have watched so far in widescreen look amazing.

Most of the videos on Youtube are not widescreen, these still look good but sense the player is now in 16:9 format you see a large black box on both sides of the frame (it’s really less distracting then it sounds).

Youtube still gives you the code for the old 4:3 (or something close to it) embed the video on an external website, for example if you go to the movies section of my site where I have some Youtube videos you’ll notice there still in the square 4:3 frame not the widescreen one. But if you shoot films in 16:9 there is a work around, I found a good tutorial on how to embed the new widescreen videos here.

Thank you Youtube for being awesome!

On a related note;

A few months back I discovered the magic &fmt=18 code. This code gives you a higher quality video when pasted at the end of the video URL, not HD but higher quality.

But if you want the official HD code is &fmt=22 just paste it at the end of the video URL to watch it in HD. But keep in mind this code will only work if the video uploaded is in HD to begin with.

written by Travis \\ tags: 16:9, 4:3, Aspect Ratio, code, HD, video, Widescreen, wikipedia, Youtube

Today I uploaded a new video check it out with the rest of my movies. A brilliant man once told me that I should torrent my films, true I but I don’t actually consider the movies I put up here to be films. Think of them as short representations of my work or a demonstration of what I’m capable of, trust me when I make a short film (coming this June), I will present it in proper fashion.

In the mean time I recently read something on Cineobscure about the possabilaty of a higher definition Youtube video. It’s actually quite simple, by adding this;

&fmt=18

at the end of any Youtube video URL you should get a higher quality version of that same video. I’ve tried it on a few videos and it’s worked very well. Keep in mind this won’t give you HD or anything close to it however I noticed the video is much cleaner. I have done this with every clip in the movies section of my website and it seems to help quite a bit.

Click the above image for a comparison of the two (the one on top is without the code the one on the bottom has it).

Image: ‘Once’ trailer.

written by Travis \\ tags: comparison, hacks, HD, Once, Quicktime, Short film, torrent, Youtube