Novelvibes

If it were up to us, every video would be 16:9, with some exceptions made for some more cinematic footage. But because there are older videos and people unaware of vertical video syndrome on YouTube, videos with inferior aspect ratios are an unfortunate reality. The team behind YouTube is making the best of this situation and has now forced its web player to adapt to different aspect ratios. left: Old. right: New. YouTube began doing this on the mobile app in March of this year, and the functionality is now spreading to the desktop. Basically, it removes the formerly-permanent 16:9 frame around every video, allowing them to appear larger and better adjust to different window sizes. left: Old. right: New. The black frame around every video has been removed, and it's especially noticeable on vertical videos. Personally, I liked having it there, but it's understandable why it was taken out. left: Old. right: New. Even 16:9 videos have grown in size, meaning that video descriptions...

I have some bad news—people will never stop shooting vertical video. This battle is lost, guys. It's time to move on. Google is moving on by making the YouTube app a little less awkward when watching such a video. In the next update, YouTube will dynamically adapt to different video shapes and sizes. Let's say someone shot a video vertically. Right now, you get black bars on either side unless you switch to full-screen. However, that also hides most of the app's UI and controls. When the new version of YouTube rolls out, the player window will resize to fill as much of the screen as possible with video—square, 16:9, vertical, whatever. Google didn't go into detail about how the controls will work, but the GIF above shows the app UI popping over the video while it's still playing. Even that is dynamic, though. It can cover just a little of the video or most of it depending on what you're doing. We don't know when this change is rolling out, only ...

We only just wrote about YouTube's new picture-in-picture test on the web, but it's common knowledge by now that Google loves running limited tests. The world's largest video sharing site is now testing a feature it calls 'miniplayer-bar' in its code, and it's something that really should have been implemented a long time ago. You know how Facebook videos follow you to the side of your feed when you begin to keep scrolling down your news feed? This is basically the same idea, except that there's a whole bar up top with the likes/dislikes, the share option, the subscribe button, and more. As soon as the entire video disappears from your screen, the bar will follow you down. To me personally, everything aside from the video itself seems a bit unnecessary, but it's nice that YouTube is testing this at all. As someone who often scrolls down to read the comments while watching videos (I'm a glutton for punishment), this is definitely a nice addi...

Google continues to improve YouTube's livestreaming features after having announced auto-captions and new chat features just last month.  Today, Google has revealed that it's refining YouTube Live's streaming process to make it much simpler and quicker for users to get their livestream up and running. Up until now, it's been fairly cumbersome to start a livestream from a computer using an encoder, requiring several steps and  specific software . With today's changes, all a user has to do is head over to  youtube.com/webcam  and hit the "Go live" button to start streaming — no additional software or setup needed. For now, the new streaming process is only available on Chrome, but support for other browsers is in the works. Google also wants to make live streaming on phones easier, and so it's working with manufacturers such as Asus, LG, Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung to integrate streaming capabilities directly into devices' camera apps u...

For a while now the YouTube app on both Android and iOS has allowed users to minimize a playing video into a floating window, letting them browse other content without interrupting playback. A similar floating mode is apparently being tested on the web now. The writers at 9to5Google discovered that YouTube on the web is A/B testing a picture-in-picture feature and it has already started hitting a small number of users. If you are one of the lucky few, you'll be able to start a video and then click anywhere on YouTube (return to the homepage, search, or browse channels) and the video will continue to play in a floating window on the bottom right corner. The name of the video shows up below the window and an icon on the bottom right brings up full scrollable playlists, plus it has play/pause, repeat, and watch next clip controls. However, since this is only showing up on a YouTube Red account, it may be restricted to Red subscribers for now (or forever). This is an incr...

The much-anticipated system-wide dark mode we were looking forward to (after the arrival of some tantalizing evidence) in an upcoming Android release may not exactly be right around the corner, but there's still ample reason to be excited if you're the kind of user who craves that easy-on-the-eyes look for your mobile apps. For months now we've been expecting a new dark mode to go live for YouTube, and while Google's not quite ready to push the button on dark-mode YouTube for Android, the feature is currently heading out to iOS users. Our first hint of serious work towards a dark mode for YouTube landed last fall, when we saw signs of a dark theme for the app's video-playback panel. While that was tantalizing preview, the makeover it delivered didn't extend to all corners of the app. We spotted YouTube making progress in that direction early this year, as settings for a dark mode started to include more and more of the app's UI elements. The playbac...