Report Playback Issues on YouTube

For a long time, and with good cause, people have been complaining there's no way to contact YouTube about issues with video playback.

It's a bit too early to say just how well this one will work, but in recent weeks they did add several items, from diagnostic tools to a link for reporting playback issue to the 'face' of videos themselves. I know I'm hoping these will work, or at least work a bit better than what has been in place so far.



Gradually, Google is coming to realize that they are not operating in a vacuum, so hopefully this is just one sign of additional options to come? Don't expect miracles, though.

This is a test - YouTube's Unlisted Videos...

Can they or can't they be embedded? This post is an attempt to test whether such videos can be embedded.



This second video is embedded from a different channel, one that is no longer tied into the Google account that handles this blog. I'm starting to suspect that problems with embedding may be related to the settings that the owner might have chosen. After all, the YouTube EDIT pages include separate modules for Privacy (where the Unlisted option appears) and another section for "Embedding."


I may leave this at that, unless something else comes up to contradict my first impressions.

YouTube users should probably still exercise caution when embedding Unlisted videos, since they're likely to become more visible if the embedding happens on any site or blog (unlike this one) where traffic is high. In fact, if you are concerned about keeping Unlisted videos at least somewhat hard to find, disabling embedding is probably not a bad idea.

Here will be my comments on whether this worked or not. Some YouTube users are reporting that these videos cannot be embedded, which is probably a good thing and an intended feature. I just don't want to make a statement about it in the Help Forum without checking things out.

There's another question about embedding, but I think it refers to links... testing it three ways here:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcStMHeMvN0

http://www.youtube.com/watch/v=UcStMHeMvN0

Where I am, only that last link is faulty. If it worked in the past I wasn't aware of it.

Demonstrating a point.

This is just an attempt to explore some options that may exist with YouTube's embedded players. The following player has been defined as 560x200. But any other set of dimensions should also be possible.

This is an extension of the post made recently, speculating about the reasons for the appearance of the viewers on YouTube itself. I have to wonder... at least I have wondered for quite awhile, whether this isn't some subtle incentive for YouTube's users to focus on using embedded players, rather than sending them to YouTube pages more directly. It's a silly and overly complicated speculation, I know.

Oddly enough, this particular player embeds the video at its uploaded dimensions. In this case, the video was rendered at 1200x496 pixels... a 2.42:1 aspect ratio I mostly invented. The 560x200 player provides a 2.8:1 aspect ratio window... wider than the uploaded video. The result is the pillarboxing you see below.

Below the jump, I'll put up a 600x248 (+30px for the progress bar) player, which should be roughly a match to the video contained there... My apologies to any early readers of this post, which should probably not have been published before debugging everything. I'll try to follow this up with some more technical details on just how to determine the size of your embedded player, once I'm a bit more sure of what I'm doing here.

Below: Bringing widescreen options to YouTube. One crazy person at a time.

This player SHOULD be a half-size match to the original upload.




And here's another example... in this case the image and rendering were matched... this should show neither letterboxing nor pillarboxing.

YouTube does CinemaScope

This video is presented as an example of an odd, and possibly unsupported YouTube feature. Recently, in the past few days, an ultrawide player appeared on YouTube, at least for some types of videos. The aspect ratio was around 2.35:1, instead of the 16:9 aspect ratio introduced back in December 2008.

Hopefully this embedded video illustrates this new format, but what's really interesting is if you follow this video back to YouTube, and use the new large screen switcher. It's a button with arrows pointing left and right. The "mouseover" text reads "Change Player Size." The odd thing at the moment though is that this player is only available if you avoid rendering in a way that triggers HD encoding.  For example, an otherwise identical clip was rendered at 1440x608 and displays on YouTube in the now familiar 16:9 ratio player.  Perhaps that will be fixed in a future update?  (Don't bet actual money on that hopeful statement, though).

Please note: to get the 2.35:1 aspect ratio embedded player below, you will need to (at present) manually change the values (both at the beginning and end) of the embedded player code. In this case the height value was 262, width 560.  If you're not familiar with the method (clicking the YouTube watermark) to open a video on its own YouTube page, you can click this link to get to the video behind the embedded player below.





Here are the detailed specs for the file uploaded above:

General
Name : Patriots90920cVryShortSM2.mp4
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID : mp42
File size : 15.0 MiB
Duration : 30s 30ms
Overall bit rate : 4 195 Kbps
Encoded date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06
Tagged date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06

Video
ID : 2
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Baseline@L3.0
Format settings, CABAC : No
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Muxing mode : Container profile=Unknown@0.0
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 30s 30ms
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 3 999 Kbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 304 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.35
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Resolution : 24 bits
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.610
Stream size : 14.3 MiB (95%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06
Tagged date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06

Audio
ID : 1
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format version : Version 4
Format profile : LC
Format settings, SBR : No
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 30s 16ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 192 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Stream size : 704 KiB (5%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06
Tagged date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06

One further point of interest, though. Even though video appears rather ugly on YouTube itself, the same trick used above, should work to conform embedded players to any non-standard aspect ratios you might want to use. See the example below:

YouTube strikes again

For the past few days, the thumbnail server code that tells an embedded player which thumbnails to show seems to think you can nest a jpeg inside another jpeg. If you're here, or on any other site with embedded YouTube videos, for that matter, the player still works but the screen appears blank and black. Just hit the play button on the second player below to confirm that. This bug is presently discussed in a fair bit of detail on the YouTube Help Forums.

The following player should work (it's not from YouTube):

Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti from Shadowgate Imageworks on Vimeo.

Albemarle Senior Choir performs Gioachino Rossini's "Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti" (Comic Duet for Two Cats). Performance at Miller Chapel, on the grounds of the Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, Saturday, July 18, 2009. Marianna Parnas-Simpson, Albemarle musical director, conducting.

This next one will work (I predict) once the code is fixed:


And so it did.

There are also so many videos being corrupted since the shift a month ago to 2GB uploads that it's stopped being funny... and I had a really great sense of humor about this stuff. That sense of humor, though, has been eroding lately, probably due to my sense of downright exhaustion, trying to field user questions and pass along pithy (or immensely verbose) observations to YouTube staff. A staff that at present seem to be dealing with far too many fires at once to be able to do more than respond haphazardly to the handful of users they've allowed to "bubble up" issues for their attention.

One more vid for the lolcat fans out there:



If I weren't so messed up in the head, I would have probably stopped doing this a few months ago, for the sake of any shreds of sanity that still remain. Unfortunately I find this whole phenomenon mesmerizing. Who knows, maybe I can turn the experience into a screenplay?

We don't really need to go into that just now, do we? I think I'll be perverse and stick two embedded players for the same videos into this post (see above), just so I can more readily see if and when the coding has been fixed.

Options to convert SD/DV to H.264/AVC

This overview of editors and converters started out as a reply in the YouTube Help Forums. I've adapted it here to try to give an overview of some of the options, and the pros and cons, when it comes to looking at the many, many choices available for dealing with video, especially converting standard definition camcorder (or DV) video to the AVC/H.264-based formats that have become the preferred options for getting the best quality for the lowest bandwidth cost for streaming video sites, from YouTube to Vimeo and beyond.

One should also be aware that some sites (Funny or Die comes to mind as one example) still prefer not to support H.264 encoding, in part because of the challenges it presents to getting consistent performance for all sorts of video and film styles, H.264 works remarkably well and efficiently to get high quality and smaller file sizes, but it works best when the video image only changes infrequently.

For example, if you shoot from a tripod, and most of your video is a long cut of yourself talking, or of a peaceful landscape, H.264 can do amazing things.

If your video clip looks like a scene from Cloverfield, on the other hand, you may see some artifacts in your H.264 encoding that may drive you a little bit bonkers.

But since so much of the "approved" content on YouTube consists of "talking head" vlogs, H.264 seems like the no-brainer solution.

For those still waiting to switch, I also suspect they've concluded that Adobe Flash's recent addition of H.264 support in recent versions of the Flash Player are just not entirely ready for "prime time." (That topic is something I may get into in more detail in some future blog entry).

I come from a somewhat biased place, since most of my editing and rendering experience has been in Vegas Pro and started with its consumer-oriented, slightly crippled siblings.

For most SD camcorders, AVI has long been the standard container format saved by most capture utilities that transform your taped video to a form that can be edited digitally. Perhaps I'll dig into one of those files one day soon and describe what you may find inside.

There are some standalone packages, many of them open source, that are mostly useful because they convert one or more video container types to a range of other types. In some cases that may be everything you need.

Since Vegas (and most NLEs) have transcoding and rendering modules built into them, I haven't really explored these packages deeply enough to have a strong opinion of them. It's best to find someone with a lot of working knowledge of these converters, to get a sense of their pros and cons, and whether they are something you need.

A lot of other video editing packages can do this as well, and there are at least some open source programs that will also create H.264 video which tends to be a little more important than whether the container is MP4 or another type (MOV, AVI, even FLV) as long as it can hold an AVC/H.264 encoded video stream.

Your choice should be based on a combination of budget factors, as well as how deeply you expect to get into editing and production.

If your time is more scarce than money, one of the commercial packages may be simpler to learn (and have more resources for training... plus, Vegas, FinalCut, or at the really high, Hollywood and Vancouver high, ends, Avid, are all tools widely used in film and TV production, (though Vegas has found it's niche more in local news and maybe cable ad production than it has found acceptance in features and among film school grads). You may find that your learned skills are somewhat more marketable, if you can claim intimate knowledge of one, and better yet, all of these programs.

I wound up gravitating to Vegas mainly because I already had a few years experience working/messing with the consumer-oriented package that Sony bought and built into Vegas Pro, and until last year I was still using one of the somewhat crippled consumer versions, so the cost of upgrading was less than if I had been starting from scratch.

For a long time I actually used Nero a lot for editing. I haven't used Nero for editing or rendering lately, so I don't know whether it has H.264 support, and if it does, just how strong that support is.

But I will say that for a long time I found Nero to be more robust and flexible than Vegas, but not nearly as adept at the (non-gimmick) creative controls that Vegas offers in abundance, and I'm not speaking of gimmicky special effects that scream "amateur" -- but the really powerful ones, like color grading and heavy duty audio editing, some of which are available in limited ways in the consumer versions, but are only fully enabled in the Pro package.

Here are some links that may get you started looking at some of the open source alternatives that have some kind of H.264 (or X.264, an open source equivalent) support:

A Listing of current Final Cut "equivalents" -- An open source fanboy introduction to and listing of all the open source NLEs that penguins love to dream about.


Blender - for the exceptionally brave It's extremely powerful, and that's the problem. But it is open source and has a dedicated user community. But the learning curve is widely recognized as very steep, in part because Blender is also a full featured CGI rendering package that, at least in theory, could be used for theatrical release production -- as long as you have a render farm handy.

I found these (and other) links by searching the terms: "open source" NLE video -- the search gave over 8,000 other hits.

I'd encourage anyone still reading this post to do as much homework as you have time for -- especially and talking to, and lurking in forums where users of the packages you're considering are most actively congregating.

The real investment here is the time you'll spend learning to edit and deal with video in all its forms -- the time (and I mean lots of it) is the real cost, compared to that, the base cost of your chosen NLE pales by comparison. In fact, I'll lay odds that within a year or two you'll have accumulated a raft of programs to assist you in production, and most can be mixed and matched, within reason. Photoshop, Painter, GIMP, and many specialized texture creating tools, for instance, may come in handy, especially if you are an admirer of Robert Rodriguez and his 5-minute Film Schools.

Likewise for audio production tools. If you're a solo artist, especially, you'll very likely wind up with more tools than have time to learn well. Which is where collaboration comes in, if you can work it out. Even with the power that computers provide in making production something one person can do alone, real talent in all areas of production is rare, and your work can be much better if you can put together a team of friends or co-workers who each have mad skills in a particular area of production work.

All programs ( of any kind, but especially NLEs) have their quirks, which you'll usually find discussed in the online forums dedicated to each package, as well as in those dedicated to to video and audio production in general.

I hope you've found this a useful starting point for investigating basic editing (and file conversion) for streaming video. Please add comments and questions, so I can do better next time... or suggest a specific area to focus on.

This is a test, a really stupid test

All of me that I'm ready to share. Okay, maybe not all. But all my Yooby Yoobness. Okay, maybe not all. How about the most recent 49 public videos I've uploaded to this channel?



This might be a better example, from a channel with very few videos:



This one doubles for the moment as a demo of database latency (see video below). I just deleted one of the videos from the channel in the second viewer, but for at least awhile this player (the one directly above this paragraph) is likely to show 5 rather than 4 videos.

As an added bonus, here's more than you ever wanted to know about database latency, or at least YouTube's take on it from almost a year ago:



Don't bother with the jump.

I told you not to bother. But I'm embedding something here anyway, just to assure myself that it will embed.

The Mystery of the Disappearing M2TS Encodings

There have been a fair number of threads in YouTube Forums lately complaining about the fairly sudden disappearance of M2TS upload capability. For those who think I may have coughed and hit 4 random keys back there, M2TS stands for MPEG Transport Stream. It's commonly the container format used by many HDV and AVCHD cameras today when video is captured from the camera and moved to local disc for editing purposes, though if you followed the link to the Wiki article, you'll also note that it's a container format primarily meant for digital broadcast (not quite the same thing as streaming video). It's a fine format for that. Uploading it to YouTube for streaming presents some problems though.

For one it's much higher definition (usually) than anything YouTube (or any other site) can actually stream back to most users, considering, for example that the data rate is usually at least 15MB/s, and can be as high as 30MB/s -- while a fast cable connection under the very best of conditions streams not much higher than 20MB/s and in reality is often limited to 6-10MB/s.

That said, it is actually possible to upload the format to YouTube and get it to convert adequately. This, however, is not an example of success:



But the following video did convert more or less correctly:



A few ideas on why these videos converted differently come after the jump...


My leading theory has to do with interlaced versus progressive scan video. The big difference between those two renders was that the first one was defined at the frame rate that my Canon XL H1 (and many HD cameras) claim to shoot at. In my case, 60i, meaning 60 frames per second, interlaced. If you're in Europe or somewhere else where PAL video is the standard, the equivalent is 50i (50 fps, interlaced).

Look at the rendering details in the video description, though, and you'll see it's closer to 30 fps, and though it's still interlaced, something tells me that YouTube want to make that act like progressive scan. Somewhere in the encoding process there's a bit of confusion, and the result seems to be that all the frames play at 30fps, in effect making the video twice as long as real time.

In contrast, the successful version was rendered at 30fps and the project definition was also at 30fps. There are some slight defects in that version that I suspect are related to it being uploaded in an interlaced format, though, and among other things that means that YouTube decided that a much higher resolution interlaced video was more artifacted and did not rate the HQ35 rendering that many people have been striving for as the happy middle that gives decent quality and sharpness without requiring viewers to have the hottest, fastest new computer or a super-fast connection.

A few key threads from YouTube Help Forums:

- Failed to convert MTS...

- M2TS Files Failed to Convert

- AVCHD and .mts files

Testing strange things

Testing an issue with playlists and favorites. This is an embedded list of 20 videos taken from my favorites. I've since pared it down to 16 videos, eliminating private videos and those that appear to not permit external embedding.



This is the part above the jump.

And this comes after. This is a video uploaded from a cellphone. (Or recorded on a cellphone, transferred to a PC, and then uploaded to the Yoob).

It's pretty chunky when viewed in "blowup" size on its YouTube page. It's not so hideous when shown in a tiny window no larger than its original resolution.

YouTube's High Quality Mystery

For those just tuning in, in about the past month or so, various problems have shown up for many people, most dramatically, the tendency of HQ videos -- those that have been encoded to YouTube's Format 35 (&fmt=35) -- to play back at roughly half their intended, uploaded frame rate.

So far there's been no real word on what's going on with the High Quality format. I do have it on reliable authority that this issue has been brought to the attention of YouTube's engineering department, but so far no word has gotten back to me that the source of the problem has been found.

The following videos will demonstrate this behavior, at least as long as the problem persists. I tried in this and other videos to duplicate the method used by user kekkomatic and described in detail in his video description.

Basically, an alternating pattern, frame-by-frame of graphic boxes were laid into the video as two overlaying video tracks. The boxes alternate left-to-right, frame for frame.

If there were no dropped frames one would see these as a sort of constantly "shimmering", rhythmically consistent set of images. When frames are dropped, instead one is likely to see the boxes "stick" on one side or the other.

To confirm that this is limited to HQ35 encoding, you can go to any affected video and force display at another quality level by pasting the following to the end of the video URL.

NQ5 - add "&fmt=5" (without the quotes)
NQ34 - &fmt=34
HQ18 - &fmt=18
HD22 - &fmt=22 (where available)
Related videos should include several other demos. Here's a playlist of several tests, including ones that did not get HQ35 encoding and are therefore largely unaffected by frame droppage. (Playlist appears below the fold).

Playlist of test videos, as noted above, appears below. (The preceding hotlink will also take you to the playlist on YouTube itself).

Videos that were not strongly affected by dropped/skipped frames are in the playlist, towards the end. The following is a further attempt to explore issues related to this problem, but it seems to have failed to achieve the HQ35 encoding. It's included here instead to test whether one can truly disable related videos in a auto-generated custom player. Only one video should be playable in this player, if that's true.

HQ revised deux

This story is about barbeque. Well, maybe not. More likely its about the way post-modern businesses change standards at a whim. Like Apple and it's madly mutating USB-2 fergawdsakes connectors for each new "generation" of the iPod nano. Used to be when a "generation" took roughly 25 years. Now, apparently, it's more like 9 months. That's a gestation period, not a generation. And Apple's making sure there's no intergenerational sexxing going on there. Gotta keep the kiddies safe, you know?

Latest case in point. As of about February 4, YouTube created (and failed to tell anyone about) a new standard for High Quality rendering. Apparently too many people were using the "old" High Quality render, which triggered more or less for anything you uploaded with a resolution higher than 640x360 pixels. They claim that they "improved" normal quality rendering, so they wanted High Quality to trigger only for uploads that were significantly higher in resolution than what they now call Normal.

Now (and I haven't tested this at all thoroughly) the new standard seems to be applied only if you render something in the range of 960 x 520 or something like that. I need to look at my specs again. Anyway, here's my first HQ render since Feb. 3.

Showing my Bias

Because this might be controversial, and because there are too many videos on the main page, I'm putting this below the fold. well, not this exactly. The this is the one that I'm giving props to, but it's a video and, well, phhhbbbttt....

I was briefly thinking about commenting here about the complaint by one user (echoed probably by many others) that YouTube has a bias to censor materials on recent events in Gaza, but instead I'm plugging a cute channel that does wonderfully witty reviews of something that's always been a guilty pleasure for me, and a source of unseemly fascination -- namely, perfumes and other commodity fragrances.

If you'd prefer some interesting thoughts on bias and materialism (as well as the Middle East), then you should probably click on those words instead of clicking below where it says "Read more!"

But the video, alas, Lass goes below the fold this time. I hate the fold. Really, I do!


This video has very little to do with Israeli-Palestinian conflict:



I'm sure this means there's a bias somewhere. Everything that is not about conflict is probably an opiate, designed to distract and take away the pain, at least for as long as the sweet fragrance remains.

Now I'm getting SO tempted to order up some Desir de Rochas and some Laundromat by Demeter. Maybe if I know that I've written them down here I'll at least have the patience to wait until I can visit a real perfume shop and at least try a whiff before spending more money on fragrances that tug at the limbic system in strange ways that I pretend not to understand.

Nominations: Best YouTube Tech Support

Maybe not. But I just wrote what has to be my personal favorite reply to a technical question so far. And I don't want to risk it being nuked, so I'm going to save it here for as much eternity as we have left.

The post should appear in context at this YouTube address.

If it's missing, or you just don't want to go to YouTube support, read it below the fold.


The post should appear in context at this YouTube address.

On Jan 1, 9:38 pm, anmoose wrote:

> I swear... We live in a society that's completely eaten up with
> instant gratification. If things don't happen two seconds after we
> click a mouse, then it must be broken. Jeez!

> Read up on the word "patience." It used to be a fairly common word.
> Then, if you can figure out how, try exercising a bit of it. In the
> real world, it can take a full day or two for search databases to
> update. Under heavy loads, it might even take three.

Well, I think these newfangled Babbage Engines did a lot to undermine
that whole "patience" concept. Personally I'm calling the War on
Instagrat over with the win totally for the Instas, d00d. ("Instagrat"
-- because Instant Gratification is just WAAAY too much to type in the
Wrld o Lulz).

Be that as it may, and feeling a Burgess Merideth librarian episode
coming on too ... I suggest instead looking up the term "propagation"
because some huge percentage of posts here (of a number that I'm just
too darn impatient to estimate) seem to be about a concept that many
of us Instanauts don't yet fully grasp, but one that will make our
lives all thrills, sparkles and pixie dust, once we do wrap it around
our heads, like a fetching headscarf.

In short, the series of Tubes that is just the YouTube is composed of
not one but many "databases" that I prefer to call magical bit-
piles. A change to one usually sends out an entrancing sparkle of
fairybyte dust that mesmerizes the worker ants and sends out a
pheremone signal to tell them to get their ant butts in gear and come
grab some of these bits, and make some copies (using methods that are
illegal to show in many countries, and most southern states).

The controlling mistress fairy, Lady Latexia, then sends them out to
all the other good little fairy princess anthills, otherwise know by
their cover identities as "databases" -- this "database" is a word
chosen for its magical power to lull most people to sleep or at least
to have them tune in the shopping channel and save the economy while
the magical anthill fairies do their strange and dangerous dances.

Sometimes fairies get lost. Sometimes pirates in Yemen run over a
magical fairy dust trunkline at the bottom of the Straits of the Gaze
and billions of fairies drown in salt water, providing the secret
ingredient for salt water taffy. Sometimes things go along being very
complicated and logical [and then a miracle happens] and then things
are more or less the way you expected them to be a few days ago and
Bruno the memory mopper runs over your head with a tow truck, spilling
memory-muddling salts all over the place. This is where that whole
"sandman" story comes from. And thus all is right in the world.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Sister Mary Explains the
Intertubes. I know I have.

Aren't you glad now that you followed below the fold?

First stab at explaining why your YouTube videos are all messed up

During December, YouTube finally did what I'd long hoped they would do. They went and changed viewing screens. They took that 1950s, 4:3 format so beloved by Barbara Billingsley fans, and swapped it for that spiffy 16:9 ratio you see every time you walk by the TV section at your favorite mass merchandiser.

Sad to say, like so much in life, this change came at a cost. For many of us who had been letterboxing our widescreen video in the old viewer as the only way (or so we thought) to preserve the original aspect ratio, to keep our subjects from looking like the inhabitants of the Planet with Incredibly Stretchy Air -- suddenly, our old, tired videos look something like this, if we're lucky:



Actually, on this page that viewer doesn't look so bad. On the YouTube page though it looks more like this:

This is very frustrating -- don't you just want to grab the corners of the image and just streeeeeetttttch them so they fill that little screen? I'm betting you do.

In fact, I'm betting you probably want your video to look more like the next video you see (points) "over there!" -->>>> (well, somewhere soon).



It's my plan, at least, to try to suggest some ways to make your video look more like the second example and less like the first.


Something you probably don't want is a version that looks like this.



Once I deal with giving you the settings and what to watch for so your videos do the proper tricks where aspect ratio is concerned, them maybe I'll get to tell you how I messed that one up, and why I even did it on purpose. In the meanwhile you might want to take a look at the file specs for that one too which, as with the other videos, is included at the end of the description block.

And so, here are the boring details.

Until I do spell this out in all its gory details (or at least the details that probably matter to the Average Josephina with a video camera, you may want to take a look at those two videos and compare them on their individual YouTube pages. In particular, look at the details given in the description for file format and other details of how each one was rendered, paying special attention to the lines about width, height and display aspect ratio. The last one can be a biggie, and there are several ways to screw up so I'll try (and most likely fail) to keep it simple.

Widescreen, but crammed into a Dior housedress of a Leave It to Beaver pseudo-screen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voPR3FhKt1k

Luxurious Luxorvision (16:9 video in a 16:9 Player):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImDmUuL_4iE

I'll try to work on a more detailed explanation in the meanwhile, aimed at those who may just be starting to learn about all the variations possible when it comes to rendering, and some of the reasons why you may be better off rendering things in moderate quality for the present and keeping control over the results, to whatever degree that might be a realistic goal.