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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

All the comments here asking to kill Shorts because "vertical video looks shit on my desktop", like who do you think YouTube is made for? A HN nerd running Linux on a desktop or the average person who has likely never touched a desktop in their life?

I remember few years back when it was genuinely cool to make fun of and take moral high ground over people taking vertical videos. How times have changed indeed! Even back then I felt vertical videos were the future (on a mobile device it was the natural filming pose, and the videos looked more immersive and personal). The UI just had to catch up (and we have to credit tik tik for discovering that).

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Vertical works fine for like, a video of someone talking. But majority of scenarios it just doesn't make sense. Film aspect ratios evolved the way they did for a reason. If you're trying to fit a lot of "things" into frame, due to the nature of gravity they're probably gonna be sitting horizontally next to each other. Not stacked on top of each other vertically.

If I want to take a picture of my desk I need to shoot in landscape. If I really want to do it in portrait I'm gonna have to either use a fish-eye lens to warp the shot, or take several steps back, leaving a bunch of useless space on the top/bottom.

It's not just a concern of device form factor.

Also the fact that human eyes are arranged horizontally, our native vision is widescreen.

I've heard that reasoning given, but I'm not convinced that makes much of a difference. Unless you're watching in one of those giant theatres where the screen wraps around the edges of the walls, the screen you're viewing something on probably isn't taking up your entire field of view. You're usually moving your eyes around to look at different points of the screen anyway, and if you can comfortably see all parts of a vertical screen it shouldn't make that much of a difference. Furthermore, if you close one eye it's not like it balances out to make horizontal and vertical video equal, nullifying the reasons I mentioned.

I think the issue is just in capturing the content. There's more useful things in the real world you can capture with a wide view than a vertical one.

Please tell me there's a way to stream YouTube videos in 256 colors in the terminal as ASCII art. As God intended.

What are the dimensions of your preferred terminal?

This is now possible (sorta), as at 3 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547259

not quite ascii art, but streaming YT to the terminal...

https://github.com/saitoha/FFmpeg-SIXEL

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