Improve Video Quality with Easy YouTube URL Addition
I found this lovely YouTube video tip at LifeHacker. The tip easily improves the quality of a YouTube video.
All you need to do is copy and paste:
&fmt=18
at the end of the URL of the video you are watching. For example, here is a YouTube Video:
ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hChq5drjQl4
All you do is paste “&fmt=18″ at the end of the URL, and you get:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hChq5drjQl4&fmt=18
Easy!
Click on each link above, and you’ll see and hear the same video, but with a difference in video and sound quality.
For example, here’s a screenshot of one frame of the video without the hack:
And here’s a screenshot of the same frame with the hack:
Notice the sharper details — and the option to “watch this video in lower quality for faster playback.” Handy!
I don’t know how long this little tip will work — but if you need to boost the quality to see some visual details or bump up the sound quality in a training video, this hack works nicely… for a while. It’s quite likely that YouTube will soon allow you to select “video quality” as a regular option.
Until then, when you need a bit of a boost, give this little URL hack a whirl!
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Comments
[...] Improve Video Quality with Easy YouTube URL Addition Improve Video Quality with Easy YouTube URL Addition Posted by Laura Bergells March 13, 2008 I found this lovely YouTube video tip at LifeHacker. The tip easily improves the quality of a YouTube video. All you need to do is copy and paste: &fmt=18 at the (tags: youtube audio quality) [...]
[...] disappointed with the quality and wondered what had gone wrong. A little investigation led me to this site that offered a very simple solution to the problem. It was to simply add &fmt=18 to the YouTube [...]
thanks for such a great tip – works brilliantly! Is there a way of including this in an uploaded file so that everyone can watch in in high quality if they don’t know about the hack?
Looks like this works…. however, I also entered &fmt=180 and the YouTube videos I tested played fine using 18 or 180 as the interger value…. but the quality was not 10 times that of &fmt=18
I tried it with a whole slew of numbers between 00 and 180 and there appears to be no linear relationship between the number setting and the quality. I’m guessing only specific numbers work…. but it’s a cool tip anyway.
This trick causes the download to have an .mp4 extension vs. the .flv extension. Try it both ways with something short like the opening theme for ‘Scooby Doo,Where Are You’ and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll have two different files—-one for each url that you use.
Laura, thanks for the great tip — I linked to this post from my blog at Absoluteppt.com