SEOTall SEO Tall

YouTube's Google Video-ization continues by using more space for the player and less space for the sidebar. YouTube changed the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9, generally used for high-definition TV. Since the videos aren't yet converted to a widescreen format, you'll see an annoying pillar box effect.

YouTube already provides an option to view higher quality versions for some videos and you can also append "&fmt=18" to the URLs for the other videos. If you add "&fmt=22", some YouTube videos are now available at an even higher quality, which makes the full screen view a very useful option. Compare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY (standard format - mono, resolution: 320x180)

Google has introduced a new system to work in conjunction with its already existing Custom Search Engine (CSE).

Since the launch of the CSE, its had a downfall for smaller publishers. The engine couldn’t index the entire site properly. With the introduction of the new system, Google’s CSE is able to index full sites using sitemaps with on-demand flexibility.

Two years after being acquired by Google, YouTube still hasn't figured out how to monetize the site. "We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying. But we have a number — and, of course, Google is an innovative place," said Eric Schmidt in August.

The option to find playlists is back at YouTube. Playlists are a great way to group related videos which can be later played one after another.

YouTube shows three popular videos from each playlist and it lets you restrict the results to a certain category, like Education, Music or Sports.

If you are logged in, YouTube saves a list of all the videos you watch, but there's no interface that displays them. When you perform a search, YouTube shows a label next to the videos you've previously viewed.

Two weeks ago, I posted how to embed a YouTube and make it start from a certain point. Now you can do the same thing for YouTube's watch pages: just append #t=XXmYYs to a YouTube URL, where XX is the number of minutes and YY is the number of seconds. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBNDYggyesc#t=24m30s.

At the end of a video, YouTube's embedded player displays a list of related videos. If they're not very relevant or you have a specific video in mind that you want to see, use the new search box and type a query. To see more results, click on the right arrow.

Unfortunately, you can't go back to the list of results after selecting a video and the related videos displayed at the bottom aren't updated, but this is yet another step towards a more interactive player.

If you want to embed a YouTube video that starts to become interesting somewhere in the middle, there's a simple way to skip the boring part. YouTube's embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video. Here's how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs.

YouTube started to add links to iTunes and Amazon MP3 for music videos from EMI Music and Universal Music. "Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products -- like songs and video games -- related to the content they're watching on the site," announces Google Blog.

YouTube shows a new option for long videos: a theater view that enlarges the player and fades out the rest of the page. Randall Munroe's talk at Google and Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford are two examples of feature length videos that should display the new option.

Unless you have been living under a bridge the past couple of years, you know that online video has become hot, hot, hot! Promoting your site, blog or product with online video is free, it’s mobile and social, so getting your vid to the most eyeballs should be easy, right?

YouTube added some new options that allow you to filter search results by type. You can restrict the results to videos uploaded by YouTube partners, videos that have annotations or closed captions. There's also an option to restrict the results to feature length videos, but it doesn't seem to work yet.

YouTube added support for closed captioning, a feature that was already available at Google Video. If you edit one of your videos, you can click on the "Captions and subtitles" section and upload a captions file.

YouTube shows a small toolbar at the bottom of the page that lets you manage the videos from a playlist, more like the controls from a media player. The toolbar has options for pausing and muting the active video, buttons for playing the next video from the playlist and for automatically playing videos. All of these options were already available in the sidebar, but the new toolbar makes them more visible and it follows you in any YouTube page.