Stoopid YouTube Tricks

YouTube was for many years only serving up crappy low rez video. It’s now been a year or more since they started allowing users to upload and serve higher quality video (640×480 h.264 video at as much as 1800 kbs, 64k mono AAC audio). You can now choose “watch in high quality” when viewing YouTube video, when available, or set your YouTube preferences to always show high quality video when available.

‘Problem was, you couldn’t easily share the better quality video using YouTube’s handy link or embed code offered up just to the right of the video player window. Those links defaulted to the lower rez offerings so it was impossible to email a link that would go straight to the higher resolution video, or even to embed the higher rez video into a web page or blog.

Turns out you can work around the low rez issue with these straight forward hacks.

To link to high quality videos append &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, like this:

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7WfEudu5E&fmt=18

To embed high quality video, add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the end of the two URLs in the embed code, like in this example

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/J11guhn6qT4&hl=en&fs=1 &ap=%2526fmt%3D18"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/J11guhn6qT4&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

To save a high quality YouTube video use the KeepVid bookmarklet.

[Via High quality YouTube video hack at Kottke.org]