YouTube on the desktop now plays vertical video without borders

YouTube is rolling out a new feature on the web to accommodate the new influx of vertical video being uploaded on its site. The firm will now remove the borders and resize the video so it displays in a manner YouTube thinks will make the best viewing experience for your device.

The announcement wasn’t made by a blog post, as per usual but was buried in the YouTube help forum last weekend before being spotted this week.

“We launched an update to the YouTube video player on desktop – the player now automatically adapts to provide the best viewing experience based on the video’s size (aspect ratio) and your computer’s screen/browser size,” one of YouTube’s community managers, Marrisa said on user forums, “Historically, for non wide-screen videos (not 16:9) like vertical and square videos, we would show black bars alongside the video, making the video really small. This update moves away from the need for black bars. We launched this update on mobile awhile back (both Android and iOS) so this change also aligns the desktop and mobile viewing experiences.”

However, users on the forum are complaining that the update is “cutting off what [they] can see rather than accommodating for it” and that it is an effective downgrade.

YouTube will likely roll out changes to fix this, hopefully soon. In the meantime users who watch vertical video on their desktop will just have to endure.

Source: The Verge