Embed Higher Quality YouTube Video Clips On Websites or Blogs

Technique for Embedding Higher Quality YouTube Video Clips On Websites or Blogs

While watching video clips on YouTube website, you can choose to view the videos in higher quality of resolution. It is also possible that you make settings so that YouTube will playback the video clip with the same high resolution quality automatically.

But, when it comes to YouTube video clips which are embedded on web pages or blogs, there is no flexibility to upgrade or switch the video-clip playback to high resolution quality. However, bloggers or webmasters can embed a high resolution code onto the website so as to allow the visitors to view the videos in high resolution mode.

Webmasters can follow the below mentioned hack to embed a code for high resolution video streaming which will stream as MP4 (H.264 Video with AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio) and will be encoded at a resolution of 480×360.  

This is very much similar to the hack used to view high resolution video clips on YouTube with &fmt=6 or &fmt=18 switch wherein the publisher requires to attach a suitable switch to YouTube embed code for the Flash Player to understand that the video has to be played with high resolution video streaming.

However, just adding the default flag “&fmt=18” at the end of the URL in the address bar won’t work. In the embed code, you need to add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” at the end of the URL of the video clip specified in “embed src” and “param value”.

You need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” at the end of the video clip URL “http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxxx&hl=en&rel=0” at two instances in the embed code, where, xxxxxxxxxxx is nothing but unique video ID.

For e.g. If the URL of the video clip is “http://www.youtube.com/v/_w0AwGCjqnw&hl=en&rel=0”, the embed code will look like:

<object width=”425? height=”344?><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/_w0AwGCjqnw&hl=en&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18?></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/_w0AwGCjqnw&hl=en&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18? type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425? height=”344?></embed></object>

Visitors will be able to enlarge the high quality YouTube video to the width equal to “480” without affecting the picture quality since the high resolution streaming video is been encoded at a resolution of 480×360.

With the arrival of High Definition (HD) era, YouTube is also able to playback the hosted videos at 720p HD picture quality resolution which is quite close to CD audio quality.