Thomas Baekdal recently wrote a post with the same title, and it interested me. I have known that sooner or later YouTube would put up some better quality videos, as they have Google’s deep pockets backing them, but what Thomas has shown is that YouTube is already doing so, at least on certain videos.
YouTube has long been the place to watch low-quality videos. While most other video sites allow you to see videos in high-quality, YouTube has stubbornly stuck with its abysmal 320×240. But there is actually a way to boost the quality.
All you need to do is to add “&fmt=6″ to the end of the URL.
He links to two trailers that are the same other than the extra bit of code he mentions, and the one with the fmt=6 is definitely of higher quality. I was shocked at the improvement, and never really noticed how muddy most YouTube videos were until I saw how high quality they could be.
I wonder how long until every video being uploaded will have this higher quality option, or when will this new higher quality version become the normal one we all see? Definitely an interesting post to check out on Baekdal.com.
[...] the rest of this great post here Author: Time: Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 1:12 pm Category: Geek Comments: You can leave [...]
[...] Chris Pirillo wrote an interesting post today on YouTube in High ResolutionHere’s a quick excerptYouTube has long been the place to watch low-quality videos. While most other video sites allow you to see videos in high-quality, YouTube has… [...]
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
Take YouTube Videos with you
YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.
YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.
Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.
Product page: http://www.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: http://www.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
Company web-site: http://www.youtuberobot.com
E-mail: support@youtuberobot.com
‘&fmt=18′ makes it use a h.264/aac .mp4 file instead. And from what i can see on the video I looked at, it is hosted on a google domain.
-Owl