from Hacker News

What if YouTube made the black empty space white? [PIC]

by elzr on 7/6/09, 10:37 AM with 17 comments

• by Raphael on 7/6/09, 12:23 PM

  Even better: make the page background black. (I did notice testing of a "turn off the lights" button, but I no longer see it.)

• by bmelton on 7/6/09, 12:32 PM

  I was expecting a commentary on whether or not this was more green, so I was a little shocked seeing the spartan page that awaited.

  I think it LOOKS a lot better. Without the benefit of commentary from the author, I can't say whether that was his intent or not. From the stills, I can say that it takes a little away from the video, in that it isn't clearly framed as the main content on the page, but I'm guessing that motion video would make that problem go away.

  As a complete aside, I almost love the lack of commentary from the author. I certainly don't recommend it for every post, but it's almost like blog art, in that the resultant conversation is free-form.

• by tetsuo13 on 7/6/09, 2:45 PM

  Perhaps use white when viewing the video is playing normally on the site and go back to black when viewing in full screen mode.

• by herval on 7/6/09, 5:08 PM

  white makes the video size quite irregular - and a lot more different from TVs (as far as I know, the background and frames are usually black). That is not an excuse on itself since it's a different media - but making it similar reduces the adoption barrier.

  And it looks a lot tidier with a cleanly defined black square anyway, imho...

• by jcsalterego on 7/6/09, 12:53 PM

  Meta-discussion: I feel like we should avoid single images if we want to avoid becoming yet another news aggregation site.

  What's next, {"Top N [Nouns] to [Verb]" | N > 1}? :(

• by drawkbox on 7/6/09, 2:38 PM

  Do it like Vimeo.

• by cflee on 7/6/09, 12:18 PM

  Is the poster trying to make a point other than that it's more aesthetically pleasing to have it white?