Friday, November 14, 2008

higher-quality videos (hidden) on youtube

this is wild:

Back in march, it was discovered that when you view a video directly on Youtube, you could add a "&fmt=18" to the URL to enable a higher quality, higher resolution stream which is encoded with the H.264 codec.

To make this work in an embedded video, however, you need a slightly different hack. After pasting the embed code into a blog post, adjust the two video URLs (one in a param tag and one as the src parameter in the embed tag) by adding "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" to the end.

check it out:

normal embed:


hi-def embed:

the bottom one definitely looks crisper to me. (the still frame is the same; you need to play the videos to see the difference.)

how long have these higher-res videos been hiding on youtube? why wouldn't youtube publicize their existence?

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