One of the things that I don’t like about youtube sometimes is the quality of the video when it is encoded. I have a HD camera and the quality is pretty good for the most part. However when its encoded on youtube the quality goes south.
The other day I was told about this trick you can do to watch your videos in higher resolution. I don’t know if this is a new feature coming soon and they don’t want to release it yet but it does work.
For example this video of mine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7y0Zt3X-zo
The titles are distored and hard to read.
however look at this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7y0Zt3X-zo&fmt=18
The quality is much better!
So append to the url &fmt=18 and you get the better resolution. I’m not sure how far back this will work on the videos but I have some video from May of 2007 that it works on.
You’ll also notice that there is a new icon that allows you to switch back and forth on the player. It only shows up when you add the &fmt=18
2 comments ↓
I see a link under your video now which says “view in high res”. It seems to use AJAX to switch resolutions, but your &fmt=18 also makes the link text say “view in low res” and the video looks much sharper.
But it only works for videos that were high res to begin with as far as I can tell. This video of Blackmore’s Night - Ghost of a Rose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nPLdKHY574 doesn’t have this option and doesn’t give any quality improvement when explicitly using the parameter.
What I’ve found is that it really depends on how old the video is and when it was uploaded on youTube. I have video from a year ago that seems to work but anything older than that it does not. I have feeling they’ve been encoded it twice for new video.
Leave a Comment