Wide screen, 16:9, HDTV, 720p, 1080p – whatever you call it, now it just seems odd to watch a video that’s not in a wide screen format. Even YouTube has totally switched over to a wide screen format for their player. So imagine my dismay when I added a wide screen YouTube video into Windows Live Writer and it didn’t appear in wide screen format. Hmmmm. Clearly, this is the stuff of which how-to tips are made.
There are a three different ways to make videos within Writer appear in wide screen format.
The first is the easiest. Instead of using Writer’s normal Video insert wizard, copy the video embed codes onto your clipboard, and then use the Paste special… command (or Ctrl-Shift-V) to paste the embed code in as HTML, and it will show up correctly.
As soon as you click OK, you’ll see the video in your blog post.
The second way is to paste the embed code for the video into the Source tab inside Writer, as shown here:
The last way is a little more involved, where you need to edit the configuration files of Writer. But it’s still not too complicated. Here are the two simple steps:
- Open C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Windows Live Writer\ResourceCache\live\VideoProvidersB2.xml replacing <username> with your user name.
- Assuming you have the most up-to-date configuration files, on line 68 under the YouTube provider, change the default insert size to be:
There you have it: three ways to get your videos to be the wide screen versions you want to show and your viewers want to see.
- Marcus, Windows Community Manager
February 3, 2009 at 2:37 pm |
Marcus is this unique to YouTube? As I have not noticed any difficulty with other video hosting solutions in 16×9. Granted, these solutions can break other stuff, but that is not necessarily relevant here. I do like the "paste special" solution. Thanks.
February 3, 2009 at 2:40 pm |
@Drew: Not 100% sure, but I think it\’s basically because of the default size we have in the Writer config file (the last thing I alluded to in the post above). If we don\’t have those default sizes for other providers, they should just work as is.
February 3, 2009 at 2:53 pm |
Hmm. Not quite sure if this will affect me Marcus. I don\’t use YouTube, only Soapbox for my videos in Writer. Good how to though!
February 3, 2009 at 7:44 pm |
Cool!
February 3, 2009 at 11:40 pm |
If you do this via the 3rd method is it a one-time only change? Seems like it would be and the other two you would need to do every time you add a video.
February 4, 2009 at 7:13 am |
@Kevin & Marci: Great Point… I should have mentioned that. The 3rd way only needs to be done once if you want all your YouTube videos to come in with that size by default.
February 4, 2009 at 8:00 am |
I was wondering – is this trick to help with aspect ratio if you haven\’t got a physical widescreen? Since I have one, I might not need to tinker with this but for others, this is a great blog, Marcus. Put me right, tho\’…one way or t\’other!
February 4, 2009 at 3:36 pm |
@Jen: This is all about how the videos appear inside the post, regardless of your monitor configuration or display settings.
February 11, 2009 at 5:31 am |
P. Blaque says: haven\’t tried it yet, but this appears to be a very useful tip; and thorough in delivery. Stop by here, you may find somthin cool…besides, I could use many such tips.
February 16, 2009 at 7:53 am |
Great tip. I don\’t need it now, but hope to be able to find it in the future when I do. Perhaps it\’s obvious, but is there an easy way to search Live blogs without searching the entire Internet universe so that I can get back to an entry like this six months from now?
March 4, 2009 at 11:55 am |
Great tip as I said before but points out an issue with online blog editing. If you paste in the HTML in online Spaces editor, it strips it before posting. We have 30% Mac users who cannot use WLW. We need a workaround or the online editor needs improvement. The embed video function also rejects the code saying it has no embed command.