I have uploaded a couple videos to Youtube, and have embedded them in posts on my Wordpress website, http://www.eternalgenesisfilms.com .

Both videos were uploaded as 720x480, with my own letterbox overlay applied to it in the editing process, so you would normally see the black bars on the top and bottom.

On both videos on my website, you can see small black bars around the video. However, if you click on them to open the actual Youtube page, you'll see that they don't have the bars on the left and right sides. On the "Ceremony Highlight Video", I used the "yt:crop=16:9" tag so that it would crop the top and bottom bars, which it did, for the most part. It wasn't exactly letterboxed to 16x9, so that's why it still shows some of the bars, but that's okay. However, on the other video, "Pre-Ceremony Highlights", I did not at the crop tag, and it seems to be doing exactly the same thing. And honestly, that's fine too.

Here's my main question: Why is the embedded video showing the bars on the left and right sides when the video on Youtube.com is not?

I've searched through some of the posts on here and didn't find this exact topic. If it's there, please direct me and I'll be glad to check it out. Thanks!

Lee