Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos

From Wired How-To Wiki

Run a well-encoded video through YouTube's backend compression engine and it's going to turn out looking worse for the wear. It's a well-known critique of the site among videophiles, and to its credit, the video-sharing site has been promising it would start encoding videos at higher resolutions. Thankfully, YouTube is finally making good on that promise.

Select videos on the site are already available in 480x360 resolution -- it's not HD, but it is a step up from the old 320x240 format. For the most part, this change only affects newer videos and YouTube is rolling it out in a somewhat haphazard manner. 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.

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Other YouTube How-Tos:

• Save YouTube Videos To Your Hard Drive
• Watch YouTube on Your iPod

Contents [hide] 1 Watch Higher-Quality YouTube Videos 2 Embedding 3 Example 4 Tips

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Watch Higher-Quality YouTube Videos

The URL Hack. Add &fmt=18 to the end of a normal YouTube URL. If there's a high quality version available, that extra string will cause it to load.

The Firefox Add-on. The team over at Lifehacker makes the Better YouTube extension for Firefox and the latest version of the add-on includes the URL hacking technique above (as well as some other goodies, like the ability to stop movies from auto-playing).

Your YouTube settings, click for larger

The Easily Overlooked Obvious 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. Obviously, this requires you to login to YouTube, so if you don't want to do that, just stick with one of the methods above.

Even at the higher quality, YouTube videos aren't going to look good on an HDTV. But for smaller monitors and laptops, they may be good enough to at least watch in full screen mode without the video turning the chunky moving blocks of color.

Embedding

Just 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 pieces elsewhere, too. Here are the changes to make:

Example

Here are screen grabs from both the high quality and low quality versions of the Beastie Boys' "Gratitude" video on YouTube. The difference is noticeable in several areas, mostly the shadows and highlights on the bassist's hands and on the background behind him.

Click for a larger view

Tips

• If you're ripping YouTube videos to your iPod, Zune or other handheld, always grab the higher-quality version. Even though those screens are tiny, they show a lot of detail, so the extra quality goes a long way.

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