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Q: When viewing “Vera” and a few other video series on YouTube, the video periodically zooms way in making the picture illegible. These also have left/right swapped, although that may be a different problem.  This problem shows on my Dell laptop as well as while using a MI Box S which is Android based.

 – Roger H.
Crestview, Florida

A:  I know of only one thing that causes a YouTube video’s zoom level to change while watching a video, Roger, and that’s the in-built zoom controls that YouTube provides.  By holding Ctrl, then pressing the + (plus)key you can zoom in.  Doing the same thing with the – key zooms out.  Pressing Ctrl+0 (zero) resets the zoom level directly to the default.

If you accept that the above keystrokes are the only things that can alter the zoom level of a running video, then it becomes a question of whether these keystrokes are accidentally being injected into the system, and if so, how.  I often have “stuff” sitting on the keyboard of my laptop, and while I admit this can occasionally cause inadvertent keystrokes, I’ve never seen anything as specific as Ctrl and plus getting pressed simultaneously, much less this happening on a fairly regular basis.  If indeed this is a keystroke problem, it’s more likely that the keyboard driver is at fault, but I would think that it that was the case, you would have problems elsewhere with errant keystrokes.

Without a really good causal identification to offer, the next best things I can offer are symptomatic solutions – that is, ways to quickly and easily stop the problem when it occurs.  A good first line of defense is to use Ctrl+0 to return the zoom level to normal.  You might also try toggling what’s called “Theater Mode” which resets video scaling in some cases.  Press “T” then press it a second time to turn it on and off.

You might also try opening YouTube in an Incognito or InPrivate mode window to bypass any cached settings or browser extensions or even malware that might be causing conflicts.

I searched for information about your mirroring problem (the correct term when your video is swapped left-to-right).  Mirroring is a feature commonly available in software that handles video.  It’s used to compensate for rear-projection setups, or instances where the video is bounced off a mirror before being projected on the screen.  There were several suggestions on how to turn screen mirroring on and off, but interestingly enough, I could not find any of the referenced controls when I visited YouTube.  So, like pretty much everything else about your question, this left me stymied.  It’s entirely possible that what you see on-screen while using YouTube is different than what I see, so I suggest you do a Google search on something like “YouTube picture swapped left o right” and see if you have the referenced controls that allow you to toggle mirroring on and off.

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My point of saying all this is that after 17 ½ years, and over 900 issues, I’m seriously considering whether I should keep the column going.  One of the things that’s weighing on me is that I haven’t received a single question in my queue since the column got removed from the paper, causing me to seriously question whether anyone is even reading it anymore.

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