Sometime earlier this year, YouTube seems to have dropped support for the 480 horizontal width embed size. I’m hoping they’ll bring it back. Bigger isn’t always better.
Most of the sites I work with have editorial column widths of about 500 to 530 pixels. That means the main column at those sites is that wide. Any video or image I want to embed needs to fit within those dimensions.
YouTube used to offer all these dimensions:
- 480×295
- 560×340
- 640×385
- 853×505
- 1280×745
In March, it told the world that by default, a larger size would not be selected. That’s fine with me. What’s not find is dropping the support for the smallest 480 width option. That was never blogged about, that I can see. It just quietly went away.
As a result, anyone like me with an editorial column width that is smaller than 560 pixels has to manually resize YouTube videos. That means picking a new width and making sure you’re using a 1.627 ratio, as described here. Fun!
What I really want is a tool that lets me enter a column width, any column width, and have YouTube create the correct embed code. Please?
While I’m begging, I’d also like a way to make an embedded video begin playing at a particular time within the video. YouTube does offer a way to link to a video to make it play from a particular time code. However, there’s no way that I can see to do the same with embedded videos.
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WordPress users are safe from this problem. It support auto embeds on plenty of websites including YouTube.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds
I stopped using embed code long time back.
Cant you just rewrite the height and width to fit your page in the embed code?
I agree. A tool that lets you enter a column width and gives you the proper embed code would be incredibly helpful.
Extra Twice, you can — and I do — but it’s a pain.
S, I haven’t played much with the WordPress embed tool, but I’d still prefer to know precisely what the dimensions are going to be. And there are lots of non-WordPress people out there.
WordPress allows you to set max width from wp-admin/options-media.php
But some videos do auto-embed in smaller sizes in my experience. Maybe because of low quality.
I personally believe that this functionality should be included by all other CMS/Blog solutions out there.
Embed codes are long and nasty. If this can turn into a popular standard, it would help a lot of bloggers around!
But yeah you are right. I was annoyed too when I noticed the removal of the customization option on YouTube. 560 is just too wide for most of the web!
Danny, you can drop some code in your CSS that can handle your resize automatically. Just find the div where your content is (in thesis it’s entry-content), then write some code for the embeds.
.entry-content embed {
display: block;
max-width: 480px; /* you can change this to whatever you want */
}
This way no matter what embed code you drop in there, it will automatically resize so that it can’t exceed that max-width. Remember though it will work on any embed within that container.
Make sense?
Hey Danny,
I agree that this was annoying. We actually made Techdirt wider to fit the new “larger” YouTube videos.
However, as to your last point, YouTube DOES let you start embeds at a specific time:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/start-youtube-video-minutes-seconds/
You have to use the start parameter. It’s a little more annoying, but I’ve done it, and it works.
I used Posterous as a front end to my blog. It automatically ingests any size video at a standard 500px width. Done…
Mike, thanks for that! I’d tried various things with the embeds before and never got it to work. Must have missed Matt’s post with the solution. That’s great.
hi danny – chiming in a bit late but since i work at youtube, wanted to let you know we hear ya re: making it easier to assign a start time and generate a URL automatically. We’ll be adding this to the UI in the not too distant future.
WRT player sizing, as pointed out, technically we support smaller sizes than our onsite defaults. At some point we’ll take another look at how to accommodate a small thumbnail pre-click, larger player post-click embed to give a great viewing experience regardless of embed size. I realize this isn’t exactly what you want, but wanted to at least let you know that we’ve heard your feedback.
thanks again for your post!
hunter walk
youtube product management
As I had the same itch to scratch over and over again, I’ve made myself a tool for generating YouTube embed codes at arbitrary sizes. It’s open for everyone to use.
Hunter, thanks so much for your comment. Very appreciated.
Robert, that tool’s awesome. But I don’t see where to paste a YouTube URL into it. I think that would make it perfect — give it a URL, then resize and get the code with the URL. Right now, I guess you have to resize, then find the test URL in the embed code and replace that with the one for your video.
Danny, you can simply paste a video’s URL into the input field after “There’s a YouTube video on the URL”, play around with the width and/or height values or slide the slider and extract the embed code.
Dead simple.
Hi Danny,
I found out about your blog on DIYtheme because I was making a research about the best wordpress theme for SEO.
I too hate Youtube’s latest dimension of the embed functionality. For newbies, it could be a pain to manually resize the video especially if they are using a WP theme with a small “content width”.
But, like me, I got used to it.
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