Between landscape and portrait orientation, widescreen and 4:3, and everything in between, there are a million videos in different formats. Users can either zoom in to fill the empty space or choose to leave black gaps at the edges of their screen. YouTube users on Android who follow this latter approach have recently started noticing gray lines in the gaps.
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Normally, that empty space around a YouTube video that doesn't completely fill your screen is meant to be black — just a blank space with no video. But after a recent update, users like diffysaro99 on Reddit and krazyfrog, VedantKalore , and cheeseco_ on X have been complaining about that empty space now appearing to be an in-between shade of gray.
On its own, this might be a neutral change, but the problem really becomes apparent when you look at content that has already been composed with black bars on both sides that are now part of the video itself — with this new behavior from the app, we get videos that are sandwiched between pairs of gray and black bars. And that doesn't look so good. The behavior seems to be different from YouTube's ambient mode, which intentionally fills dark areas of the screen with color for aesthetic reasons.
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Google may actually agree that this is undesirable, as we see an official YouTube Team X responding to these reports as follows:
- We hear you. Confirming that we are aware and are currently working to fix it. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.
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With the new 20.13.32 beta, Google seems to have brought this behavior back. The beta now displays videos in black on the sidebars, just like we're used to. Hopefully, this just means it's a matter of time before the fix.
Source: androidauthority
