Fantastic video, but it winds me up when they add padding to a phone video to make it landscape, as if no one in existence might possibly be viewing their phone-generated content on a phone.
It's because the content was likely preprocessed for broadcast news. Which means normal 16:9 landscape format.
Vertical video has done nothing but introduce constant issues. I used to be a guide for Jeep runs, and I was also the video editor for the run videos (just clips from the run with music). And naturally you can't be everywhere, so 95% of the clips have to be recorded by everyone else. Even though they were told "don't record vertical video because we can't use it" they did so anyways, and were upset when we couldn't use their videos.
And to be clear, this isn't just a random video. We're talking about a large organized and legally registered club, so we kept everything to a certain standard of quality. Vertical videos are not suitable for anything except a phone.
Why can't you use it? Because your web designer isn't designing for the possibility that people use a phone to access the Web, but it's not 2004 any more and they're living in the past.
You showed your colours when you assumed that portrait video is of lower quality. It's only of lower quality if you've padded it out and are watching it on a landscape screen!
Technology to detect whether your webpage is being viewed landscape has existed for a long time, and takes very simple calculations indeed or just a splash or two of css to maximise the video size for whatever screen it's being viewed on. It's design laziness and wasted bandwidth to put the silly blurry bars or even black bars down the side of the video. But don't force landscape on everyone. Smart phones aren't new and they aren't going away.
I suspect that the majority of people who spend even a tiny bit more than half of their recreational screen time looking at a fixed landscape screen are well over thirty.
Yeah adding padding is always harmful. If the aspect ratio doesn't match it's not like the video breaks so just let the player deal with it. Anyone who has a problem with vertical videos isn't going to be any happier that you added bars to it. Who is this solution for?
This is what I always wonder when they tell me a plant "tolerates clay soil". Like does it really? Or does it just avoid it by spreading out all its roots in the thin topsoil? This would seem to be the latter.