Higher quality Youtube?
[update: It's working again!]
Seems there is a hack to get better quality out of Youtube!
add "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=6" to the end of the URL you of the vid you're watching and see the improvement in quality (tis doesn't work for ALL videos, some obviously haven't been re-encoded yet).
Below is an example, a project by some of my students.
Normal Youtube video is encoded as FLV (OnVP6) 320 × 240, 200 kbps, Audio mono, 22.05 kHz, 61 kbps
The higher quality video is encoded as MP4 (H.264), 480 × 360, 400 kbps, audio is stereo, 44.1 kHz, 118 kbps
So better resolution, better datarate, better codec, better audio.
However at present you can't embed the H.264 versions.
[UPDATE: On Thursday 6th March 2007. The "feature" seemed to have been disable. However by friday it is working again!]
posted by Dylan Pank @ 11:02 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
even the flash is h264, it's just embedded in there - remember that google re-encoded video a year ago as part of a program to be compatible with apple TV and then iphone. However for embedding the video in a web page it needs a shell, like flash or quicktime.
It's all flash! Adobe introduced support for H.264 last year in Beta and released it officially in january. However the original .FLV encodes use the SPARK H.263 codec (originally a codec for video conferencing I think). In the meantime Youtubes been converting all it's vids for AppleTV and iPhone. At some stage this was all bound to converge.
What I meant was that you can't embed the higher quality version in the Youtube Player and place it on another web page, or at last I can't work out how and I spent an hour or two trying!
One thing you can do is rip the mp4 stream from the page using the Safari trick I outlined in an earlier post. However this is a violation of Youtube's terms of blah blah blah...
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