Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

If you go onto YouTube today you may notice something different and although you may be a regular visitor, you could still not notice for half an hour like me.  If you don’t want me to spoil it for you (assuming you didn’t read the title of this post) run off to www.youtube.com and see if you can spot anything different, but for those who don’t like a challenge, who are lazy, or never go on YouTube here it is…

YouTube has finally gone widescreen. 

Yes, after months of agonizing at the squashed figures on the YouTube videos, you can now sit back and use your entire 16:9 screen which will be great for some people.  But fear not if you still have a measly 4:3 screen as YouTube will still support this ratio, although you will have black bars down the side which can still be annoying.

But it gets better: they have also upped the width of the page to 960 pixels, which will increase the quality of playback thus making YouTube a more enjoyable experience.  This will give a cleaner image and will make YouTube much more practical for viewing videos with minute details (such as baseball) as well as movies, bringing it into line with other video services.  In fact, compared to sites like Vimeo they are back in the stone ages: Vimeo have had widescreen for ages, as well as having HD since October which is probably quite a long way off for YouTube due to the effort it would take to change anything on YouTube.

“We’re expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them.  This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience.” - YouTube spokesman

However I do have a sneaky suspicion as to why they originally decided to do this, and I have a feeling it’s not because of home videos.  YouTube have been vying to host movies directly from the studios for quite some time, and deals with CBS and MGM mean that they are starting to show some of the archives on the website.  But if YouTube want to start showing movies, they needed to first get adequate quality (which they have now done) and with one obstacle down you can’t help but wonder how long it will be till you can watch new releases on YouTube.

Source [PCPro]