I don’t know about you, but it took me a little while to get my head around designing for different screen resolutions. It can be confusing. But if you are designing websites you need to understand the different screen resolutions, and if you are creating videos you need to master aspect ratios too.
In recent years many screens, especially flat screens, were built to 800 by 600 pixels. What is a pixel? This is the smallest point your screen can render. My old desktop PC flatscreen is 800 by 600. But most screens in 2009 are 1024 by 768 pixels. Newer screens are higher resolution. My laptop resolution is 1280 by 800 pixels. So, is 800 by 600 dead? Absolutely not. PDAs and mobiles are often this size and many people still use older screens.
So, if you design for 800 by 600 pixels, your web page will render correctly on more screens. You can also choose to render your page fixed or fluid width. Fluid designs will automatically fill the screen whatever the size. You can always tell a fluid design as you can see the page adjusting. Be careful with images as they are fixed width, whereas the text can adjust to fit the width of the screen. If the image is too wide for the screen, you will end up with horizontal scroll bars along the bottom of the browser window, which doesn’t look good.
Screen resolutions for youtube videos causes confusion too. Especially when youtube adopted High Definition (HD) over standard video sizes. Youtube’s standard video size is 640 by 480 (actually it renders 320 by 240), which is an aspect ratio of 4:3 (width:length). But their High Definition standard is 1280 by 720, which is an aspect ratio of 16:9 and is wider. This is why older videos have the vertical black bands either side of the screen.
Hand in hand with screen sizes comes video conversion, another confusing topic. Why are there so many video formats? Probably because there are many different commercial organisations involved in producing video. Today’s video is by ehow tech and shows you how to convert your videos from MOV, WMV, FLV, ASF or MKV to AVI or MP4 using freely available conversion software.
Screen resolution, sizes and video conversion doesn’t have to be confusing.
