YouTube "Watch in High Quality" - Embed High Quality Videos Into Your Blogs

I almost gave up on YouTube because everytime I uploaded nice looking video, YouTube just degraded the resolution and it really looked bad.  I just accepted that as a fact of life and it moved me along to open up a Mixpo account.

YouTube has changed.  They now actually store a "high quality" version of many videos even though they usually still serve up the normal low quality version.  They actually also have a "HD" version of videos, depending on the resolution of the video that is uploaded to YouTube originally. 

There are several ways to get YouTube to play the "high quality" versions of videos. 

• If you are on the YouTube site watching videos, some videos will show down on the bottom right corner under the video "Watch in High Quality".  Just click on that and it will play the video in high quality.
• You also can go to your account settings and there's a place to make it a default to play "high quality" when available.
• You can also add some stuff at the end of the YouTube url.  Just add "&fmt=18".  For example, if the YouTube url is  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY  just add that little extra at the end to give you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=18

The trick that got me really excited and jumping for joy was finding out how to embed a "high quality" YouTube video into a blog or web page so your videos look really nice for your viewers and they don't have to worry about clicking links or adding something to the url.

Take a look at these three versions of the same video.  The first is the "normal quality" that will normally be the version that YouTube serves up to viewers.  The next one is the "high quality" version and the third is the "HD" version.   The HD version doesn't work well on my computer.  It might need a very fast connection to take advantage of it.

Normal

High Quality

High Definition

 

If you just copy and paste the embed code from the YouTube page for that video, it's only going to play the "normal quality" version.  The trick is that you have to add some extra code in two spots to the embed code.  Don't worry, it's not too tough to do.  In the YouTube embed code, you need to add and append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the end of the video clip's url specified in "param value" and "embed src"

So for the above example, the normal embed code is:

To get the high quality version you need to add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 at the end of the two urls in the code to get:

I know I lost most people here but take the time to understand this little trick so your YouTube videos won't dissappoint you.  Here's the site where I found how to do this.  They might explain it a little better than I did.  To embed the HD version, you do the same thing but the last two digits are 22 instead of 18 for the extra code that you add in those two spot in the embed code.  But I think the HD is a little bit of overkill for most.

Play around with it and let me know if you have success.

My next post will show you a trick to stop those "related videos" from showing up at the end of your embedded YouTube video.