Dan’s Tech-n-Stuff Weblog

Google is working on an updated version of their player that will automatically detect a users connection speed and serve up a different video quality depending on the speed.

If you don’t want to wait for that there’s a hack you can use to get higher quality videos right now and its simple–just add a few characters at the end of the URL.

The default resolution for YouTube videos is 320 x 240. To watch it with a resolution of 448 x 336, add &fmt=6 to the end of the URL. To watch it at 480 x 360, add &fmt=18 to the end.

Here’s an example:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nzxa0SLWMnc (regular 320 x 240)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nzxa0SLWMnc&fmt=6 (448 x 336)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nzxa0SLWMnc&fmt=18 (480 x 360)

This hack won’t work for all videos, but for the ones it does work for you’ll be happy to have it.

If you use Firefox there’s an add-on you can use to do this automatically called Better YouTube which you can grab here.

[Via Yahoo! Tech]