How to make YouTube videos smaller

Posted on April 22, 2008 at 5:23 am

Recently a friend asked me how to make YouTube videos smaller for his MySpace profile, so I did a little bit of tweaking and gave him a solution! By default, when you copy the embed code for a video from YouTube, the size of the video is 425 by 355 pixels. That’s great, but it would be nice if they let you choose your own custom size!

So if you are looking for a way to shrink the size of YouTube videos so that they fit correctly on different sites like MySpace, your blog, or wherever, then here’s a simple trick you can use.

First, go ahead and copy the YouTube embed code for the video you want to shrink.

The code will look something like this:

You will notice the "WIDTH" and "HEIGHT" values in the code. There are actually two sets of these tags, one set in the beginning and one set at the end.

Go ahead and paste this code into a text editor of your choice, Notepad was fine for me. Without changing anything else, go ahead and change the values of the width and height to the desired value. Remember that when changing the values for width and height to make sure you maintain the aspect ratio.

If you’re not sure what that means, go ahead and divide the width by the height of a default sized YouTube video and what do you get?

425 / 355 = 1.197

That is the ratio of the width to the height. So if you want the video to be 300 pixels wide, then just divide that by 1.197 to get the value of the height, which would be:

300 / 1.197 = 250

So that’s it! Your code should look something like this now:

So this is what my video looked like on my blog before I made the changes to the size:

Here’s what the video looked like after I made it smaller by editing the tags:

Much smaller! There you go, a very simple way to make YouTube videos smaller. You can increase the size of a YouTube video in the same way! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: youtube video smaller, make youtube video smaller, make youtube videos smaller, small youtube video, make a youtube video smaller

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8 Responses to “How to make YouTube videos smaller”

Siddharth said on : April 22nd, 2008 at 6:40 am

This was really easy trick
anyone knwing li’l html can do it
anywayz thx for it

akishore said on : April 22nd, 2008 at 9:17 am

Siddharth, yeah it’s a very simple trick to make YouTube videos smaller! Not very technical, so anyone can do it.

Siddharth said on : April 22nd, 2008 at 9:22 am

hey bro
I think u need to edit the page
as it is spoiling the whole page
you can use the textarea form field for doing it

Revista Luna Negra said on : April 23rd, 2008 at 10:45 pm

Realmente sencillo y te ahorra espacio, muy buen tip, gracias.

Theremin said on : April 24th, 2008 at 4:42 am

excellent tip! thanks for sharing…just what i was looking for!

Lilian said on : May 5th, 2008 at 4:02 pm

Muy bueno el truco, gracias me ha servido de mucho.=)

jesus said on : June 27th, 2008 at 10:16 am

muy interesante esta informacion , trataba hace tiempo de colocar un video de youtube en la columna lateral de mi blog, al parecer fue muy sencillo , gracias por la ayuda …