How to Resize a YouTube Video

You can put YouTube videos on your own blog. If it doesn't quite fit into the space you have, you can resize the video to fit. Here are the steps to doing it.

Things You'll Need

• A blog or web page
• An Internet connection (not necessary to have a YouTube account)

Instructions

1. 

   The way to get a You Tube video is to embed it in your blog. When this option is available for a video, you see it on the right of the video after the word Embed. In the image, you see it marked with a red oval.

2. A single click anywhere in the embed code should be enough to highlight all of the code. Copy this code. You are now ready to paste it into your blog.

3. 

   In Wordpress, the embed code has to be entered into the blog post using the HTML tab. Click the tab that says HTML (highlighted with a red oval in the image), then paste in the code. It may look somewhat different on a blogging platform other than Wordpress, but you should have the same function available.

4. Once you have the code entered on the HTML tab, you can click back to Visual to see how it looks.

   In Wordpress, I don't actually see the video. I see a placeholder with a little "f" in the middle. (The "f" stands for Flash video.)

   Click on the placeholder image for the video. That selects it. You'll see the placeholder image becomes wrapped in a border and small boxes appear at the corners and sides of the borders. These boxes are resize handles.

   If you hold your mouse over any of the corner boxes, you should see the cursor change. When you see the changed cursor, you are ready to resize.

5. To resize, you click and drag. There's a fine point to resizing. If you want to keep the proportions (the height and width relationship) of the image the same you need to hold down the Shift key while you click and drag. If you don't use the Shift key to constrain the proportions, you may distort the image by making it too tall and narrow or too short and wide.

6. If your blog doesn't give you the nice bounding box and resize handles for dragging to a smaller size, you can still resize the video. You have to do a little math. And you get to play in the HTML code!

   In the embed code you copied from YouTube, look for something like this:

   object width="425" height="344"

   Those numbers determine the display size. You can change the numbers. The math involved is easy with a calculator.

   Do the same math on both numbers. (The numbers represent pixels, by the way. Pixels are the units your computer screen uses to measure things.) Suppose you want the video to be 75% of the original size. Here's how I find 75% on my calculator-if you still remember your high school math you may have another way to do it.

   425 X .75 = 318.75

   Round that off to 318. Change the width to read width="318". Then use the same percentage to calculate the height.

   344 X .75 = 258

   Change the height to read height="258". You reduced the width and height by the same proportions.

   Of course you could make it 50% of its original size by doing 425 x .5 = 212 and 344 X .5 = 172. Or 85% of its original size by ... well, you get the idea. Just use the same percentage on both numbers so that you keep the proportions right.
   Put the new numbers in the code (be sure you don't remove the quotes around the numbers when you change them) and the video will display at the new size.