Sorry, not really 'software' as such, but does anyone know what settings your suposed to use for widescreen videos on youtube ?

They changed the layout a while ago, and now all 4:3 videos play in the middle of the 'screen'

I only use widescreen, so when i save my videos for youtube i just change the project to 4:3, so its got the black bars on it, easy

but now i want to just save them as widescreen and have them play in widescreen in the full box, but i have tried it once and i just ended up with a squashed up 4:3 video

I know its no doubt something youtube has done to stop things being so simple, but hopefully someone has worked it out by now ?

I use a setting of 640 x 360 and export as mpeg4, I found a great freeware utility called MPEG_Streamclip1.2 and that has a lot of options in it. I don't squash or stretch the video or change the pixel shape from square to rectangular and it seems to look alright when played back. If you want to give MPEG_Streamclip1.2 a go then it can be downloaded from Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows, you will also need to download QuicktimeAlt181 (also freeware) and run and install it first before you use MPEG_Streamclip1.2.

If you merely stretch the 4 3 to 16 9 everyone will look like citizens of the united states.

You need to crop the to and bottom and render a sq pixel file at 720p res. I suggets u loading wmv at 3bmit/sec. Works well for me.

Blimey, we all do it differently! I output 512 x 288 (no cropping) with square pixels (this accounts for the pixel aspect change, hence the no cropping) using WMV at about 1,000kbps. These settings are used for Vimeo and the results are these: Marc Peters' videos on Vimeo. (Note that these videos range from a £100 camera to a £4,000 one).

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I got the size of their new playback screen by just taking a screen grab and measuring it in a photo editor. Horizontally it measured 640 pixels and uppy downy it measured 360 pixels, not very scientific I know but I couldn't be bothered looking to see where YouTube had buried that information. Seems to work alright with no black bars at the top or bottom. I try to keep the filesize as small as possible so I use a data rate around 2500kb per sec and use MPEG4/H264 with 128kb audio and sometimes I push the boat out with 256kb audio.

With You Tubes new "HD" option, you can upload videos upto a size of 1280x720, this will then automatically have the "HD" option. Also you can use higher data rates, i use 5000kbps.

Like Nikosony, i use MPEG_Streamclip. I havent found anything better than this yet. seems to give good results.