- YouTube introduced a new landscape orientation feature in Shorts.
- It will allow you to watch Shorts in landscape mode, leaving space on both sides.
- This feature might be made for people with motor impairments.
Short videos are a trend now whether it’s on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts. People prefer quick content over long-form content in their day-to-day scrolling. YouTube Shorts, launched as a vertical-only format, gained massive traction and even started outperforming regular videos for many creators. But now, YouTube is doing something unusual. They’re adding a landscape mode for Shorts, which defeats the whole point of “Shorts,” doesn’t it?
As spotted by Android Authority, a new option called Rotate Shorts popped up on YouTube, and yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds. Shorts were designed for portrait viewing, so turning them into landscape format kind of messes with the whole vibe. If you rotate the video, it just shrinks and leaves black bars on both sides, which honestly feels a bit off for a format that’s supposed to be fullscreen and immersive.
YouTube Adds Landscape Support to Shorts
This new Rotate Shorts feature was spotted inside YouTube’s Accessibility settings. When your phone is set to Auto-Rotate, turning it sideways now makes Shorts play in landscape mode.
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In this view, the video shrinks down (since it’s still a vertical recording), with playback controls on the right and a progress bar at the bottom. Watching a portrait-shot video in the landscape doesn’t make much sense, especially on modern smartphones with 20:9 aspect ratios like the latest Nothing Phone (3). This results in an even smaller video window that’s harder to watch.
The only logical reason this could exist is for accessibility purposes, since the feature is available under Accessibility settings. It doesn’t seem designed for tablets or foldables, because YouTube already handles those with proper orientation scaling. Even if you upload a landscape video as a Short, YouTube still forces it into portrait format.
Not sure what YouTube is trying to achieve with this update, but you can try it out by updating to version 20.26.31 or above. Stay tuned for more updates like these.
