Youtube automatically cropping videos?

So I just noticed something weird going on with YT, it seems that it's automatically cropping some videos that were 4x3 letterbox. For instance, this TV trailer for The Thin Red Line that I uploaded last night. The movie scenes are presented on my original tape/file as something around 1.85:1 letterboxed inside the 4x3 frame, but Youtube has automatically cropped the "black bars" out to make the video widescreen. This wouldn't be a big deal (well, other than making already-crappy VHS quality captures look even crappier by zooming), but as you can see at the end when the credits are shown, this part was totally 4x3 without letterboxing but YT's cropping has chopped the top/bottom off.

So far I've noticed this has only happened to two of my videos (and it's not even uniform, since some others I've recently uploaded that also were letterboxed 4x3 came through fine), so I'm guessing it's something new, but is there any way to turn this feature off? Here's the Thin Red trailer in question:

 

Yep, and it's also dynamic because the zoom/crop level can change during a video. I can see why they've done it - the number of 4:3 letterbox videos is stupid, but it's also annoying for some videos.

 

Interesting. Wonder when they started doing this? It's possible I may have some others that have been affected too and I just didn't check to notice. Like I said, it wouldn't be so bad if it was accurate and could switch back to 4x3 when necessary, and if it didn't zoom in on already pretty awful VHS quality clips (which accounts for most vintage stuff like this on YT). They really oughta add a way to disable it.

 

Yes, I noticed this too, when doing so Old Grey Whistle Test edit uploads recently...
Relevant help page : http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1722171