I may be a bit late on this one, but about bloody time. YouTube has finally switched from 4:3 ratio to 16:9 so the masses of people wanted to upload widescreen video clips - which most video uses these days - can finally have their contributions viewed properly online. It’s strange because the likes of Vimeo have been using widescreen for ages, so why did it take so long for a multi-million dollar company like YouTube / Google to make the switch? I mean, YouTube has been going for years…
I’ve noticed that YouTube has added many new features to ist service of late, such as the captions and subtitles, annotations and endless lists of recommendations, suggestions and promotions. It’s almost like being in an online shop sometimes - but it’s always nice to see a widescreen TV.
I was recently making one of my websites compliant when I became aware that the basic code that YouTube provides users is not compliant with the global XHTML standards - meaning that my site was not fully user-friendly while it was on there.
It turns out that the W3C Validator isn’t keen on <embed> tags appearing anywhere on the page, so I did a bit of research and cam across the following replacement code which works and is completely compliant with the standards:
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”350″ data=”http://www.youtube.com/v/yourcode“><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/yourcode” /></object>
The parts where it says your code need to be replaced with the extension that applies to the location of your YouTube video - this is present in the orginal embed code and can be just copied and pasted across.
I’m getting sick of YouTube.
Two of my videos that have been on YouTube for about two years now and had a combined viewing figure of over 7,000 views have recently been blocked from playback due to copyright issues.These two videos were both very popular and had recieved a lot of comments with praise.
It wouldn’t bother me but I have seen dozens of videos similar to mine which have used the same music and they remain online and untouched. Why should mine get blocked and theirs allowed to continue? I understand that copyrighs have to be protected so I won’t do anything about it and I accept that fact, but surely half the videos on YouTube are infringing those rights in exactly the same wa, yet they go unnoticed.
