Support for Vertical Format Display (YouTube Shorts)

[marvelxx35]

Hi 👋,

First off, thank you for this amazing library — it’s been incredibly helpful!

I’ve noticed that YouTube Shorts (which are vertical videos) don’t render properly in the current player setup. Shorts often appear letterboxed or cropped when displayed in the default landscape-oriented player view.

Issue:
The library currently does not provide native support or a layout configuration that optimally displays vertical videos like YouTube Shorts. Since Shorts are becoming a more popular content format, having vertical display support (9:16 aspect ratio) would be a great enhancement.

Expected Behavior:
• Shorts should display without black bars or incorrect scaling.
• Ideally, the player should auto-adjust to the video’s aspect ratio, or allow developers to configure it via layout settings.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a Shorts URL (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID)
2. Observe layout in YouTubePlayerView

Possible Workaround:
Manually adjusting the YouTubePlayerView size to match a vertical ratio (e.g., height > width) helps, but this isn’t ideal and still doesn’t use the proper layout.

Feature Request:
Add built-in support or a guide/example for rendering vertical videos in a full-height layout that respects the native aspect ratio of YouTube Shorts.

Let me know if there’s a workaround or if I can help contribute a fix!

Thanks again 🙌

[PierfrancescoSoffritti]

Hey, from the top of my head, two things need to be figured out:

1. Is there a way to know if a video is a short or regular YouTube video?
2. To render a short with the correct format, is it enough to change width and heigh of the player?

[marvelxx35]

Thanks for the quick response!

1. Identifying Shorts
   You can use the YouTube Shorts URL format (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID) to load a Short. If the video exists as a Short, this URL will render the correct vertical layout in a browser. So simply using that format can help distinguish Shorts from regular videos in the app.

Shorts default URL: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
Regular default URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

2. Rendering Format
   Yes — from my testing, it seems like updating the YouTubePlayerView dimensions to reflect a 9:16 aspect ratio <iframe width="395" height="702"> should be enough to display Shorts in a way that feels natural and full-frame. It’s essentially about matching the layout to the video format.

[PierfrancescoSoffritti]

Using the url won't work, since the player plays videos by id only.

[pooya-mohammadhossein]

Why not my friend? I mean won’t work if before rendering make substring of url to distinguish if the video id is short or long?

[PierfrancescoSoffritti]

since the player plays videos by id only

[marvelxx35]

Ah that makes sense — thanks for explaining.

In that case, would it be possible for the library to optionally accept a full YouTube URL (instead of just the video ID), and internally extract the ID? That way, it could also inspect the URL path to check if it’s a Shorts URL (e.g., youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID), and use that as a signal to adjust the player layout accordingly (e.g., 9:16 aspect ratio).

Even if the video is still played via the ID, having access to the full URL can help determine the right layout to render it in — especially since the IFrame API doesn’t expose much in terms of video metadata.

[PierfrancescoSoffritti]

Adding url parsing to the library seems error prone and might break at some point. I'd prefer adding a property like var isVerticalVideo: Boolean to YouTubePlayerView so callers can decide on their own.

[marvelxx35]

That sounds great — I agree that keeping URL parsing outside the library makes sense and helps with long-term stability.

The isVerticalVideo property sounds like a clean solution! That would definitely give developers the flexibility to handle Shorts and other vertical videos as needed.

I think a lot of apps embedding YouTube content would benefit from having better support for vertical formats.

Thanks again for considering this!