This post has been contributed by TheTechpedia via CBN
The words YouTube and “high-resolution” have never really fit well in the same sentence. YouTube has always greatly limited the resolution of their videos to conserve on bandwidth, but going forward that may not always be the case. As it turns out there is a little something that you can add on to the end of a YouTube URL to have it play a high-resolution version of the same video.
YouTube started to test higher quality videos. If you append &fmt=6 to the URL of a YouTube video, you should get better quality videos. Note that this only works for a small number of videos.
Here’s an example of video that’s available both in the regular version (320×240) and in a higher quality encoding (448×336). The audio is now encoded at a sample rate of 44100 Hz, up from 22050 Hz. As you can see in the screenshots below, the right image is clearer and more detailed.
While this increase of resolution might seem minor, for the example above YouTube’s re-encoded FLV file is more than twice bigger than the old one (from 9 MB to 22 MB), so it will load much slower.
If you append &fmt=18, YouTube downloads the video as a MP4 (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480×360. Here’s the same video encoded as MP4.
You can use Greasemonkey script that automatically adds the magic parameter for you.
