Higher quality video playback available on YouTube

Poststructural Pub
1

Reading some video-production centric blogs, I found this tip:

Add the following string of characters to the end of any YouTube url and get the higher definition version if its available:

&fmt=18

It works on many videos if they were originally uploaded in higher quality.

For example, with my own Tradlessons videos:

Compare:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1yeCci4KVA

with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1yeCci4KVA&fmt=18

In this case, I originally uploaded a 640x480 version of the file, the second one is much clearer.

Cheers,

Michael

2

i tried it and it worked. great trick, Michael, thanks a lot for posting this.

3

Wow, I’d heard about this, but hadn’t tried it yet. It’s not just the video that’s
better, the audio is much cleaner, too. They really do a lot of violence to the
uploaded clips!

4

The two videos were the same for me, but I have noticed some changes in video quality recently.

I checked my Youtube account’s settings and in Account > Video Playback Settings it looks like this:

As you can see, my playback quality was set to automatic.
I don’t know when they introduced this feature, but I have a 100Mbit FTTH connection and it has probably been showing high quality videos for a while.

It looks like it is worth keeping up to date with Youtube’s undercover updates.

Mukade

5

Thanks for that last tip, I had no idea those settings existed!