HQTube

So YouTube now allows you to upload vids at a slightly higher quality - 480x360 resolution to be precise. May not seem like a lot but it does make things seems a little clearer. The increase in audio quality is a little more noticeable (44100 Hz, up from 22050 Hz) but I think thats just because it used to sound pretty awful.

There are a number of ways to see the higher quality vids on YouTube, but so far none are especially straightforward.
The most common is to append &fmt=18, which I'm told 'downloads the video as a MP4 (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480x360'. But there is also the mention of adding &fmt=6 which results in a different resolution (448x336) on selected vids. I'm not sure what Google thought they were doing here, but it seems to have been implemented in a pretty awkward way.

You can also change your account settings to automatically play the higher quality vids if they are available but, for me at least, this still makes it confusing because you are never sure which type is playing. Of course, as I'm on a 1 meg connection, the fact that the video is loading like an ameoba relay race is probably a good indication.

Anyway to enable this, go into your YouTube account, then down at the bottom under ACCOUNT/Video Playback Quality choose - 'I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it's available'.




























As a test I thought I'd try to embed two vids, in old and new resolution, beside each other. I'm not that excited about the new Iron Man film but I'll use it as an example anyway.






Hmmmm, I followed all the directions. Maybe because the trailer is widescreen some of the values need to change... Robert Downey Jr. does seem a little stretched :)


Anyway, thanks to http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Watch_Higher_Quality_YouTube_Videos for the info and the (somewhat faulty) embedding instructions. I'll give it another go later.

P.S. it seems that there is no way to embed the non mp4 vids at present so the audio quality of the Iron Man trailer does not have higher bitrate audio but is apparently in stereo. Is anyone else confused yet?