Eliminating Dreaded Black Bars on Embedded YouTube Videos On WordPress

  • Unknown's avatar
    captjoe06 · Member ·

    I’ve searched for answers but hadn’t found them so I thought I would share what I finally figured out after hours and hours of pulling my hair out. I had a little help from one of my contributors Paul Morrison who deserves some of the credit for helping me find the solution.

    When using shortcode to embed my widescreen (16:9) youtube videos I’d get the ugly black bars at the top and bottom. See this post for examples-

    http://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/wooohooooo-thanks-paul-morrison-solving-the-dreaded-black-bar-effect/

    It was driving me nuts til I saw one of my contributors post one of my videos in a post he did sans black bars in the video. When I posted the same video using the youtube shortcode or the add video > from url option I’d get the ugly black bars and less width

    This is what worked for me to solve this problem-
    I copy the share this video url which is offered up directly under the video where it is hosted on youtube and paste that url without any shortcode or pressing the add video button > from url button

    Then for some reason I need to add a line of text, any text below the video url

    You cannot center it, align left, or align right and if you preview it in the HTML option you should see no other code around that youtube url whatsoever

    This is the solution for me anyway.

    Forgive me if this solution has already been discussed but if it has I couldn’t find it. i’m just trying to help others that might have had the same frustrations I had.

    Hope this helps someone out there that may have been experiencing the same problems I was.

    It could be that the theme that I use (Ocean Mist) puts the funky code in there as it does when I use the “Blog This” feature with Flickr. it inserts 4 lines of strange code that I have to manually go in and erase each time I use that “Blog This” feature on my Ocean Mist themed blog but not on others that I use.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    arifsali · Member ·

    You are right, it seems, posting just the youtube link on its own, adjusts the video screen size. However, you don’t really have to type any text to make it work, I just tested without the text. Thanks for this tip, I had no idea.

  • Unknown's avatar
    captjoe06 · Member ·

    Glad to help

    :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    feartheseeds · Member ·

    There’s an excellent tutorial on how to use short-codes to modify WordPress’ audio / video players, including modifying the size of the YouTube player, here:

    http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/category/shortcodes/

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