It's been in trial for almost two years, with no actual progress, roadmap or estimated release date. In fact, they broke it for a lot of videos in february, and haven't managed to fix it since. I really wouldn't bet on an official release this decade, much less speedy bug fixes.
That said, lacking alternatives to html5 that aren't malware disguised as a browser plugin, I've been using html5 mode for quite a while. So if you can support it, please do, even if google doesn't.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Isn't html5 mode something you have to set in your Youtube account settings? At least this means most viewers won't have this problem.
I doubt custom aspect ratios are even supported in the html5 player in any other way than a video header. And I don't even know if that is supported. Perhaps this is something we'd have to test and possibly take up with the browsers' bugtrackers.
Isn't html5 mode something you have to set in your Youtube account settings? At least this means most viewers won't have this problem.
That was true a year ago. Today youtube uses autodetection. If flash is available, it is used. If flash isn't available, but html5 is, html5 is used. Lacking either, an error message is thrown.
The setting at http://www.youtube.com/html5 merely tells youtube to try html5 first, using flash as a fallback.
I don't have flash, so I'm getting the html5 version. So do many mobile devices, or people with non-windows OSes where flash isn't pre-installed. Without touching any hidden setting.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Well, if custom aspect ratios are only supported via video file header in html5, then it would be rather difficult for Youtube to fix it on their end. Although they could make sure that ratio flags are respected and copied over to their derivatives, I suppose, but that wouldn't completely fix the problem since what we're talking about here is the non-destructive tag that you can add to your videos.
If there's some other way, like via an attribute given to the <video> element, then they could fix it, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist.
edit: judging by the spec, they ought to be able to fix this by passing along videoWidth/videoHeight... http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-video-element.html#video but I haven't tested this to make sure it works.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Ilari wrote:
Dada wrote:
If there's some other way, like via an attribute given to the <video> element, then they could fix it, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist.
Width and Height attributes of <video> element? But I don't know if that works.
VideoWidth/VideoHeight is read-only.
You're right, I didn't read it properly. Judging by a more thorough reading, there's no real way to control the aspect ratio of the video. Changing width/height causes letter/pillarboxing.
That's a roundabout way of saying that custom aspect ratios are specified in the video, not in the html. There doesn't appear to be a way of overriding it in the video element.
Using css transform:scaleX(..) might work, but it isn't standardized yet. It's supported by all major browsers (with their respective prefixes), but I haven't checked if they support applying it to <video> tags.
/edit: I checked Firefox, and scaling via css transform works, e.g.
/edit2: so does opera, if you replace -moz- with -o-
So it seems that it would be fixable on youtube's end. If they actually cared.
So the actual problem is that youtube destroys aspect ratio information when re-encoding into their different formats?
So the actual problem is that youtube destroys aspect ratio information when re-encoding into their different formats?
Youtube will try to re-encode everything to square pixels.
Since that isn't what we're after, TAS doesn't send any aspect ratio info with the 8x8 resizes, and relies on the stretch tag to fix things.
So what we'd want is for Youtube to pass the stretch info onto the css.
