[Colleen Henry]

I have not tried to make a portrait mode video on an ipad, but it should be totally possible. We respect the resolutions and aspect ratios we are provided, and letterboxing and pillarboxing is added by the player dynamically.

Thus, instead of giving us 1024×768 for an ipad, give us 768×1024. When your video is watched in landscape mode, it will have very large pillboxes. When you rotate it to portrait mode, it should fill perfectly.

[Colleen Henry]

Thanks for the feedback :).

As to the the bitrates seem excessive, that is being explained in the next revision of the specs. I swear there is a reason!

The key is to think of what you upload to youtube as your golden master, not just a means to today’s end. When a file is uploaded to YouTube, we treat it as a mezzanine file. From there, we create all of the necessary formats and bitrates for delivery to viewers on every platform and network condition. Having better quality as a mezzanine file, allows us to improve the output quality here.

Even cooler than that though, is we can use the mezzanine file to re-output new deliverable formats at a later date. Since devices and network connections keep getting better, as well as cool new codec technology like WebM, YouTube can keep your content looking fresh and up to date for years! High bitrate master files will keep you looking awesome while others dont age as well 🙂

[Colleen Henry]

Greetings,

My name is Colleen, I am the engineer at Google who wrote these specs and is working hard to make ingestion into YouTube in extremely high quality much easier.

If you guys have any feedback on the specs, please let me know. They will be evolving over time, and I will be refining and adding more detail.

Though I cant provide day to day debugging and support, I would love to hear from you guys what you would like to see in this realm.

I’ll bookmark this thread and check back in later.