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YouTube’s dynamic player for square & vertical video begins rolling out on Android

Last June, YouTube announced that its mobile apps would soon gain a dynamic video player that automatically adjusts to content in different aspect ratios. After rolling out to iOS in December, it is now finally coming to the Android client.

Video is increasingly captured in different aspect ratios given the popularity of apps like Snapchat. Besides vertical, square-shaped recordings are also a common rival to the traditional horizontal clip.

YouTube for Android will now do its best to fill the screen with video and get rid of the black bars previously used to fit content into the app’s standard horizontal window.

Square and vertical video will fill up the screen, with whatever space remaining below containing the usual video title, toolbar, and watch suggestions. As you scroll, the video will continue to play as the window shrinks to the usual horizontal shape.

In our brief testing, we’ve encountered that YouTube will not fully display vertical 16:9 content, instead cutting off the top and bottom. Users still have the ability to go fullscreen by tapping the expand icon, which now adapts to the video shape, in the bottom-right corner.

The feature is widely rolling out to Android with several devices we’ve checked already having the functionality. Open the video below in the YouTube app to see whether the dynamic player is live for you.


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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com