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YouTube Testing Higher Resolution Video

Posted by James | Filed under Play, Tube, Web

Following the announcement in November, YouTube has started to test higher quality videos. If you append &fmt=6 to the URL of a YouTube video, you should get better quality videos. Note that this works only for a small number of videos so far.

Here’s an example of a video that’s available in both the regular (320×240) version, and in a higher quality encoding (448×336). The audio is now encoded at a sample rate of 44100 Hz, up from 22050 Hz. As you can see from the screenshot, the right image is clearer and more detailed.

youtube-better-quality-videos

While this increase of resolution might seem minor, for the example above YouTube’s re-encoded FLV file is more than twice bigger than the old one (from 9 MB to 22 MB), so it will load much slower.

If you append &fmt=18, YouTube downloads the video as a MP4 (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480×360. Here’s the same video encoded as MP4.