alt Hacker NewsYouTube, as well as any decent player, plays any aspect ratio video, even portrait mode.
As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.
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Ah yes, the good old "shot in portrait mode, converted to 16:9 with added black bars, and then displayed under YT shorts in portrait mode again" category on youtube. This is almost artistic at this point. Sometimes I wonder how small can the content of a video get before people will stop watching it. Is there any research on this?
What do you do if you want to combine several sources with different aspect ratios? Surely black bars are acceptable in that case?
> As an uploader you should never add black bars
In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.