I've done a few really serious posts recently, so I thought it would be fun to do something a bit more fun for a change. How many of us watch videos on YouTube? Almost everybody (everyone who doesn't have a filter, that is). But how many of us are sick of the horrible quality of the movies (No, not the stupidity of the kid pouring soup down his brother's back, I'm talking about the video quality, the sharpness of the picture)? I know I am. At least, I used to be. However, I recently was shown this really cool trick: if you add
&fmt=18 to the very end of the video url, it forces Youtube to play in higher quality! See, when you upload a video to Youtube, it gets recompiled into FLV. But, when you add this code, it plays an MPEG-4 version, which is higher quality.
Now for the caveats. Since this video is higher quality, it is also larger (For one Music video I checked out, the FLV version was 11 MBs, while the MPEG-4 one was 22 MBs). This means if you have slow internet connection speed, or a slow computer, you'll want to use this feature with caution. Also, this doesn't work with every single video on Youtube. I think it's just more recently uploaded ones.
Enjoy.
6 comments:
Wow! That worked really well! Thanks for the tip, and no hard feelings! ;-)
~Elliot
I have a filter on my school computer....but there isn't much on youtube that I'd want to watch. Most of the stuff that is actually funny has way too much swearing and stuff....
:)Ian(:
Will that help the sound quality too?
Thanks, I'll try it.
Yes, the sound quality should increase as well. In the video I checked out (All Hands on Deck, by Waking Ashland a very nice song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_FitshqVDI ) the FLV is mono 22 khz, while the MPEG is Stereo 44 khz.
Oh man, thanks a heap and then some! How'd you find out?
A friend showed it to me.
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