Embed High Quality YouTube Videos

Unknown to many, YouTube has, for a time, been quietly offering high-quality versions of a few of their videos via a “watch in high quality” link right below the player. It definitely is not HD, but the video would be a noticable upgrade from the usual crappy quality video offered by YouTube.

YouTube, by default, offers the normal low-quality version, but there’s a way to enable high-quality by default, embed these high-quality videos on other sites, and to link to these HQ videos, and even save these HQ videos on your computer.

Set high-quality as the default setting
Log in to your YouTube account, go to go to Account / Playback Setup / Video Playback Quality and select the option to “I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it’s available.”

Linking to the high-quality video
Take the usual YouTube URL, then add “&fmt=18″ or “&fmt=22″ at the end of the URL, like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da_E9P9dWU0&fmt=18

“&fmt=18″ would give you an mp4 encoded video using H.264 with stereo AAC sound at 480×360. “&fmt=22″ would give you the 720p version. Take note though, not all videos will have both the 480×360 and the 720p version. Some videos have one version but not the other, so you might want to try both.

Embedding high quality YouTube videos
Making a quick change to the embed code actually gives you better video quality, as the “&fmt=18″ trick won’t work here. Instead of that code earlier, instead add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ to the end of the URLs in your embed code. Here’s how to do it:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/Da_E9P9dWU0&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/Da_E9P9dWU0&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Copy-pasting that code will embed the video in high-quality.

Downloading HQ videos:
This only works when you’re viewing a high-quality video on YouTube. Just go to KeepVid.com and follow the instructions o their site to install the bookmarklet so you’d be able to download the video in mp4 format, which you can view at a later time in your computer, iPod, or iPhone. The downloaded mp4 would most likely be in letterbox format (480×198, or roughly the standard 2.40:1 aspect ratio).

Not convinced? Compare this video against this video, and you’ll see what I mean.