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The move goes some way to catching up with the higher quality of other video-sharing sites, such as Vimeo, which has offered HD content since October last year.

"Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback from you about what you'd like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind," says a post on the official YouTube blog, which has since been removed.

"We're expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience."

Any videos uploaded prior to the change will continue to display as normal, and 4:3 videos can still be uploaded by users.

As one comment on Digg pointed out, "now there's a lot of re-encoding the world has to do."