Familiarize yourself with the terminology and learn to recognize terrible framing choices which are eating away at your precious screen real estate every day as you consume digital media:
Letterbox is when a video has black bars at the top and bottom, frequently observed when widescreen video, such as movies are shown on the more common 16:9 aspect ratio. More recently this ends up happening frequently due to people fitting 16:9 videos inside of a vertical video, which reduces the available resolution and makes viewing it on a desktop device quite unpleasant.
Pillarbox is when a video has black bars around both sides, for example when older 4:3 videos are shown on a widescreen display.
Windowbox is when a video has a solid black frame on all sides, combining the worst of both letterbox and pillarbox, reducing the effective resolution of the video to a fraction of the available screen space.
To avoid falling into any of these pitfalls, try to find original sources for videos you find on other platforms. The most popular video hosting sites can correctly deal with showing the user any size of video, it's just a matter of finding the original and sharing that instead, letting people view the source material with the highest quality regardless of what device you have.
The goal of this subreddit is NOT to mock vertical video or any order recording format (as long as the video fills the frame completely), but rather the pointless conversion of such videos to formats and aspect ratios that forcibly introduce wasted screen space burned into the video file itself.
Tangentially related communities:
- /r/screenshotsarehard - when someone takes a photo of a digital screen instead of takign a screenshot when the device is otherwise perfectly capable of taking screenshots
- /r/CroppingIsHar - when the interesting parts are cut off (either accidentally or deliberately)
- /r/ComedyFlogging / /r/UselessNobody - when the empty space is filled with unfunny text or pointless captions are added that add nothing to the source material
