I sure love embedding YouTube videos onto blogs, this Web site and pretty much everywhere else on the Web. The joy of embedding brings with it a decision though – what size should I make the embed? We have our own standard here at WebProNews and many other Web sites have their own standard sizes as well, but this isn’t about us. It’s about the developers who make applications using the YouTube API.

YouTube allows you to embed videos at any size, but it restricts certain player features if you go below a certain size limit. Before today, that size was never really defined. It was just more of a “post the video and find out” kind of thing. There is now a definitive size threshold now and it’s 200px by 200px.

The change will be taking place in late April of this year. If you’re using the Facebook API in an application and it runs videos smaller than that, you will want to change it to something larger to avoid your videos dropping regular player features.

To give you an idea of how big 200×200 is, check out one of my favorite videos below. I’m surprised YouTube is allowing it to go this small, but it at least opens it to more mobile devices with screens that might not support large videos.