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YouTube Now in Widescreen with 720p Support!

YouTube is finally getting more widescreen friendly, and thus, more HD friendly.

About a year ago, they added 16:9 support, meaning if your video was widescreen, it would automatically add black bars into its then native 4:3 standard screen. Now they’ve made YouTube videos play in a native, wider 16:9 frame altogether.

Also, the new resolution is wider.  It used to be 425×320, and now it’s at 640×360, which YouTube says is supposed to reflect the higher quality videos that have now surfaced.

This is great, as it was long overdue. Many of the other providers, like Google Video, Vimeo (which has HD support, btw), and blip.tv were all in native 16:9 and YouTube was still stuck in 4:3. I think it’s because YouTube had such a huge amount of old school users that “broadcasted” themselves in 4:3 that the transition to widescreen had to be a bit gradual.

It gets better, though. To top it off, Belal gave me the heads up that YouTube now supports 720p! For those of you wondering what 720p is, it’s an HD standard resolution. In other words, legit HD on YouTube!

If you’re a YouTuber, now is the time to switch to 16:9. Chances are your camera or webcam has a setting that enables you to record in widescreen, and once you get that going, you’re videos will look a lot cooler. I’ve been uploading in widescreen for some time now, and alhumdulillah most of my YouTube vids will make the transition just fine (there’s some I gotta go back and re-upload).

I say this to YouTube: it’s about TIME, guys! Welcome to 2008, eleven months down the line :). Now all you guys need to do is get rid of the annoying 10 minute time and 100MB file size limits on uploads. I can’t imagine how people will be uploading longer videos in 720 with such roadblocks.

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