Better Youtube Experience

There is a secret circulating accross the web that won’t be considered a “secret” for long. In preparation for a global upgrade of all their content, YouTube has already converted many of their videos to a higher-quality 480×360 version. Actually selected videos are already in that format, although not in HD but youtube is getting there. Some the videos are identified on the site with a little link offering to take you to a higher res version, but if you want to see the high quality version by default here are a few ways to pull that off.

However you can also spice up youtube's video quality right now with just a few adjustments. Here are some few tips on how to watch youtube video with higher quality.

Tip 1: URL

When viewing a movie on YouTube, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. In addition to slight video improvement, you should also notice increased audio quality. Notice the word “slight.” I hope
YouTube goes further than this humble baby step towards something more like Vimeo’s level of quality.

Tip 2: Firefox Extension

There’s also a Firefox extension that supports higher-quality YouTube playback. "Enhances YouTube with Greasemonkey user scripts, that offer options like the FlowPlayer "doesn't start till you hit play" viewer, clean "theater" view, higher res videos, and links to download the video automatically." Download this youtube firefox add-on.

Tip 3: The overlooked method

If you're logged in to YouTube anyway, just head over to your account settings page. Near the bottom you'll find a "Video Quality" option. Click that link and you'll land on a page where you can choose to always see the higher quality videos.

By simply adding the fmt=18 bit to the URLs in a video's regular embed code won't work. You have to add a couple of small chnages, too. Here are the changes to make:

[object width="480" height="397"][param name="movie" value="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"][/param][param name="wmode" value="window"][/param][embed src="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="window" width="480" height="397"][/embed][/object]

** FYI for presentation purposes, I have changed all symbols "< >" to "[ ]" so that blospot wont chop off rest of the code.

Example:

Normal Youtube video - Mika Love Today



Better Quality: Mika - Love Today (embed code - tweaked)




Source: wired.com