YouTube Testing Even Higher Quality Videos

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22]

YouTube, purveyor of some of worst looking flash video is finally getting their act together. We posted the other day about embedding videos using &fmt=18 to get higher quality YouTube videos. It seems the awesome knob has now been turned up to &fmt=22. All of the previous tricks should work, just use 22 instead of 18. This all depends on the highdef version being available. Now they just need to get rid of the grainy preview images.

27 thoughts on “YouTube Testing Even Higher Quality Videos

  1. Wow. Turn it down. The service sucks as it is right now. The last several months it has slowed down to suckville. I’ve got a 20/2 connection and its still buffers like hell even at the University.

  2. I haven’t had any trouble. Youtube is just fine, your getting throttled, have a problem on your computer, or have a slow connection.

    I just tried to play this vid on the family computer and it didn’t get past the black screen, while on my gaming/everything else rig it played just fine.

  3. Worked perfectly at work on my laptop, a bit of buffering at first on my home system while downloading torrents. Just had to pause and wait a few seconds.

    Youtube is fine. If it doesn’t work for you, it’s your connection or system.

  4. I wrote a userscript to automatically redirect all my youtube viewing to the high-quality version. Add that to the userscript that makes the vids bigger and you’ve got one heck of a viewing experience. It just uses indexOf to check if the URL contains “fmt”.. if not it adds “&fmt=18” to the end. I would update it for the new fmt=22, however; when I change it to 22, I get a normal quality vid… what’s the deal with that?

  5. The quality looks great, but it doesn’t seem to work on most of the videos I try it on… Maybe another thing to add to the article would be how to best prepare videos in a “future-proofed” fashion? AKA, a guide for video uploaders to prepare their videos (compression & format) for the best results, especially at the increased quality? That’s something I find useful (there’s lots of different guides out there, but I’ve yet to see one that covers the higher quality/resolutions that are starting to be supported.)

    Maybe not entirely hack content, but (considering it’s an undocumented feature for both the viewers and the creators) still relevant, IMO.

  6. Great, however the problem with YouTube isn’t the quality but he length of time. Having a 12 minute video rejected because it’s two minutes too long is just lame.

    Having to have an account with over 10,000 views before you qualify for an account which can upload longer video is equally lame.

    They say it’s because of people uploading illegal content however I call BS, it’s all about pandering to the big media companies and giving them privileged access, over us people with little money.

  7. I have noticed slower youtube speeds as well, some videos buffer fast/normal, while other videos of shorter or equal length buffer slower or stall. I always thought it was because different videos were hosted on different servers that were farther away from me or under a heavier load.

  8. Seems indeed that if you add 22 and it’s not available it jumps to low quality even if the 18 quality is available, they need to redo their scripts to jump to the 18 if 22 is asked but not available, but manually adding 18 or 22 is of course not officially supported anyway, so I wonder if they will fix that, perhaps they prefer you to log in and set HQ in settings rather than using scripts or plugins.

  9. Now if only flash on linux wasn’t so resource intensive. My main rig plays those just fine in linux, but the little old sempron in the living room doesn’t do so well under linux.

    So Adobe I’m putting the blame for this stuttery video at your feet.

  10. @plague420, same thing up until today. videos are loading insanely faster now adays for no reason I can tell.

    @edward nardella, I have 6 computers in the apt and they all played the same way, slow. 20mb down, 2mb up confirmed by downloading msdn stuff AFTER trying to do youtube with NOTHING else running. Lots of others these last few months were having problems, check youtube’s help site.

  11. Audio? 99% of the music on yuotube is mono, who want to listen to music in mono? And who cares if it’s in sync when mono sound is much worse for music enjoyment, with music the synchronism is less important, not to mention that such issues are probably present in the original video to begin with.

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