Youtube is the most popular video site on the web with thousands of videos having been submitted by the community for your viewing pleasure. One of the downsides to youtube though has been videos at times being low quality and looking very pixelated, what if there was a way to view youtube videos in slightly higher quality?. Well there is, it isn’t HD but it’s better than standard for some clips.

The technique to view youtube videos in higher quality is extremley simple and can be applied to any youtube video, it will however only work directly on the youtube website and only for some videos reportedly all after 2006.

Being as Joss Stone has been in the news for saying Piracy is great and supporting musical freedom of consumption we though it only fair to use one of her videos as a demo.

A normal low quality youtube video looks like below, watch the clip carefully and note any pixelation’s you see.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ytsHaxV0SKM

Now the for the cool part in the url below we have added &fmt=18 and the sound and video quality have improved, as we said it’s not HD but it’s definitely better quality.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ytsHaxV0SKM&fmt=18

Looking at the video location on the youtube server reveals a little more as to how this method works.

When you are viewing a low quality video on youtube it would seem to grab the video from a cache, for some reason cached videos are slightly lower quality. The image below shows the where the video is being called from in low quality mode.

When you add the &fmt=18 code the the end of a youtube url however the video is played direct from the server and not from a cache, this would seem to improve the overall quality slightly. The image below shows where the video is being called from in high quality mode.

This trick won’t work on all youtube videos but it’s fun to play around with, if your like me and listen to videos on decent audio equipment music videos in particular are better because of the improved sound.

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Tags | high quality, youtube, youtube hack, youtube hd