We always tried to respect the video aspect by adding black bands at top and bottom of the video. In fact, that was true when your video is 16:9 and your format is 4:3.

Now, 16:9 is becoming the new standard because of HD format, HD TV, and even the web. You may already know that YouTube changed their flash player to be displayed in 16:9 instead of 4:3.

This is why, we added the side padding in our internal encoder, so you can now convert 4:3 videos into true 16:9 ones. To have the good aspect, the video will have black bands at left and right like in the screenshot above.