Check whether a video aspect ratio matches a platform requirement

It tells you whether the geometry matches, whether a narrower source would need bars at the sides, or whether a wider source would need its sides cropped. No video upload or decoding is involved: enter a ratio, platform, and placement to get a deterministic answer suitable for planning, validation, or an automated publishing workflow.

Choose the destination before judging the source

Aspect-ratio compliance belongs to a placement, not merely to a platform name. A standard YouTube video uses a horizontal frame, while YouTube Shorts uses a vertical frame. Instagram likewise has separate portrait feed, square feed, Reels, and Stories destinations. Select the exact pair that represents where the asset will appear, then provide the video's displayed ratio in width-to-height notation, such as 16:9, 9:16, 4:5, or 1:1. Decimal components are accepted when a source uses a less familiar format. The checker normalizes the platform and placement labels to lowercase, looks up the declared destination frame, and compares the two numerical ratios. It does not inspect a filename, resolution, rotation tag, or encoded media stream. If a phone recording contains orientation metadata, determine the dimensions after that rotation is applied and submit the corresponding displayed ratio. This keeps the answer tied to the frame viewers will actually see rather than the storage orientation of the file. Unsupported combinations are rejected explicitly, so an automation cannot accidentally apply a feed rule to a story or borrow one platform's convention for another.

Interpret match, letterbox, and crop results

A matches result means the source and destination have the same mathematical shape within a very small floating-point tolerance. No geometric accommodation is necessary. A letterboxed result means the source is narrower than the destination frame. Preserving every part of that source in the required frame leaves unused space at the sides, commonly called pillarboxing even though this tool uses letterboxed as the general result category requested by the API. A cropped result means the source is wider than the destination. Filling the frame at its full height would remove content from the left and right edges. These labels describe a centered geometric fit, not a guarantee that every platform uploader will process the file in exactly that way. An uploader might offer manual reframing, use a blurred background, accept several ratios, or revise its product behavior. Use the result to identify whether editorial attention is needed. If it says cropped, inspect subjects, captions, logos, and other important material near both side edges. If it says letterboxed, decide whether deliberate background treatment is preferable to plain bars.

Put the check ahead of publishing and transcoding

Run the check as soon as a destination is assigned, before spending time on a final render, upload, or media review. A content-management system can store the intended platform and placement beside each asset, calculate the displayed ratio from trusted metadata, and call this capability as a validation step. Exact matches can continue automatically. Letterboxed or cropped results can create a review task, select a prepared alternate master, or route the asset to a separate crop calculation. Keep the returned required_ratio with the audit record so an editor understands what target drove the decision. The response also repeats the normalized platform, placement, and submitted ratio, which makes logs easier to inspect and prevents confusion when one source is distributed to several channels. This capability deliberately does not resize pixels, calculate safe zones, predict compression, or claim that a platform will reject an upload. Requirements and uploader behavior can change, so treat the finite matrix as the contract of this checker and update your publishing policy when your organization adopts a different specification. Through the API, each deterministic check costs $0.002; the calculation itself requires no media transfer.