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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

This is a Youtube UI issue to be honest, most other video players don't letter box a vertical video and just play it at the right aspect ratio

I know that people extrapolate this experience to other things they think they dislike about vertical videos, but satisfaction improves with the player itself working well

The ubiquitous mobile device audience is fine too, as the video fits their screens just like the device it was recorded on. With the exception of youtube.

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I disagree. Rotating 90 degrees a phone is a lot easier than doing the same with a 27" computer screen. They assume everyone is using a phone completely disregarding people with computers; for that matter vertical videos are in my personal delete/ignore/never produce/never share list.

you can just view it with part of your 27" monitor

That would defeat the purpose of having a bigger screen. The other way 100% of their phone screen estate and our monitors would be used, at the price of a 90 degrees hand rotation on their part.

You are of course free to swim against the current any boycott things as you see fit. This does not change the fact that YouTube needs to fix its player behavior to better accommodate the majority. Solving that issue will not prevent you from yelling at clouds.

Yeah, man, I wish we'd stop putting **ing black bars on things

My favorite is when I'm on my phone, and I run across a vertical video with horizontal black bars padding it out to 16x9 plus user-hostile configuration to make it impossible to resize in any way. I end up having to watch a postage stamp-sized version of the video

Majority? Vertical videos suck from a videography perspective. Even if we were all using phones most videos are better off widescreen because they capture surrounding context and not just a shitload of the sky and the ground.

Vertical videos work against the way our eyes are placed and were introduced only because they work on vertical screens. Sorta because if you ever watched some interesting videos shot with a cellphone then broadcast from the TV, the ones showing important stuff going on -that is, not food recipes or kittens- you immediately realize there's something missing, and that something is the context in which things are happening: the surrounding area. You may complain about the black bars added on the sides and you're technically right, I however complain about the lack of context because the lower part of the picture shows the ground and the upper part the sky or some buildings well above the action. Our eyes are arranged horizontally because we live in a 3D but mostly horizontal space: if you shoot a vertical video of a car accident you almost certainly get a great picture of the 3rd floor of a nearby building but chances are that you miss completely a vehicle or pedestrian on the left or right that could have triggered the accident. There's a valid reason why screens are more large than high, and forcing people to shoot and watch vertical videos goes against any common sense in the name of selling more and more cellphones, services and advertising.

> Our eyes are arranged horizontally because we live in a 3D but mostly horizontal space

The weakest argument regarding this topic

> if you shoot a vertical video of a car accident you almost certainly get a great picture of the 3rd floor of a nearby building but chances are that you miss completely a vehicle or pedestrian on the left or right that could have triggered the accident

Zoom out, create a composition, pan. Same as with a 1:1 aspect ratio or a 16:9 horizontal aspect ratio.

It doesn’t defeat the purpose of having a bigger screen any more than a window manager does.

It is considerably more convenient to record a vertical video on a phone, which is probably the more tangible benefit at that moment.

There had been correctly functioning vertical videos on YouTube for a 3-4 years. That I can watch in full screen on my phone.

So it's possible, but don't know how easy it is for the uploader.

And also youtube shorts are correctly sized

Maybe, i was watching it on my phone, not sure what i can do as a user other than ask people to record / upload their videos in another format.

Pressure youtube into fixing their player by acknowledging they are the problem

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