Okay, so I was messing around with my Squarespace site the other day, trying to get a video to look right. It was one of those standard 16:9 widescreen deals, you know, like pretty much every video you see on YouTube or whatever. But for some reason, it just wasn’t filling the space correctly. It was showing up all small and weird, with big black bars on the sides. Not a good look.
So, I started digging around, trying to figure out what was going on. I’m no coding expert, but I can usually muddle my way through things. First, I checked the video block settings in Squarespace. Everything seemed normal there – aspect ratio set to “auto,” all that jazz. Still no luck.
My Simple “Hack”
Then, I remembered something I’d seen online about using a little bit of custom CSS to force things into shape. Basically, you can wrap your video in a container and then tell that container to behave a certain way. I’m not gonna pretend I understand all the technical details, but here’s what I did:
- First, I added a Code Block to my Squarespace page, right where I wanted the video to go.
- Then, I pasted in some basic HTML to create a container. Just a simple <div> with a class. I called it “video-container” ’cause, well, it’s containing the video.
It looked something like this:
<div class=”video-container”> </div>
Next, I put my embed code for the 16:9 TV video inside that <div>. The Embed Block, or the copy-paste the embed code from your original website that provide the video.
<div class=”video-container”> My video embed code went here </div>
- Finally, and this is the important part, I added another Code Block, this time with some CSS. This is the stuff that actually tells the browser how to display the video.
The CSS looked like this:
<style>
.video-container {
position: relative;
padding-bottom: 56.25%; / This is the magic number for 16:9 aspect ratio /
height: 0;
overflow: hidden;
.video-container iframe,
.video-container object,
.video-container embed {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
</style>
I pasted that into the second Code Block, saved everything, and boom! The video fit perfectly. It stretched to fill the entire width of the area, and the height adjusted automatically to keep that nice 16:9 ratio. No more black bars!
I’m sure there are other ways to do this, maybe even easier ways, but this worked for me. It’s a simple little trick, but it made a big difference in how my site looked. If you’re having the same problem, give it a try! It might just save you a headache.