Working With High Quality YouTube Videos

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZTJbsUcdeU&fmt=18]

[Kottke] posted advice for watching and sharing high quality YouTube videos. While it’s not HD quality, it’s much, much better than the normal, fuzzy quality you get on most videos. This hack has been available for some time, but it hasn’t been documented very well until now. When you’re logged in, you can just set the default to “Always play higher-quality video when it’s available”. When you’re linking to a video, add &fmt=18 to the YouTube URL. This also works when you’re embedding the link in WordPress. If you’re not in WordPress, then tack &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 onto each URL in the embeddable code. It’s pretty simple, and makes wasting your day at work much more enjoyable.

22 thoughts on “Working With High Quality YouTube Videos

  1. Wow that highest quality sample in his update comment that the youtube engineer gave him the link to in an email sure has a prat in it eh, it’s a pity since it prevent me from sharing the link with acquaintances and friends.

  2. Oh I wanted to add: I’d rather have a way to make the damn vids stereo myself rather than this old stuff, stereo sound on youtube is super rare, and so needed, even music clips sony puts up are mono, it’s a tragic assault on the senses, and shows how sony feels about music..
    And another addendum: there are plugins for firefox to force HQ play too, even when you aren’t logged into youtube so your settings aren’t active.

  3. Great for those of us who are still on limited connections (512kbps here) and still cant handle the (384kbps) standard video that YouTube puts out without juttering, and grinding browsers to a halt!

    Cant wait for these to be embedded on peoples webpages and saturate my connection!

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