Youtube Videos in High-Defintion? Hack Youtube for HD Video Playback

Boy was I happy to find out about this….  If you remember our Online Video Predictions for 2008 post from last year, our first was…

“1) HD High-definition Video - I expect Youtube and others to follow suite with the sites that already support High Definition content.”

According to Wired.com, Youtube is currently testing out high-quality 1280×720 (720p) video playback.  There is a simple hack to see this in action, and…  it is the same hack that we posted about earlier in the year to test out the “High-Quality” mode before they rolled that out to users… namely by adding “&fmt=22″ to the end of the URL string – IE – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgan4rt7ZHw&fmt=22

There is also a great post up on Cnet where the author did a test and uploaded the video above in H.264.  The author states that it was not made available as HD right away but that it took about 15min. for the high-definition version to be available.  The author hypothesizes that Youtube could be doing a second round of processing at the same time that it is encoding H.264 conversions for playback on iPhones.

About the Author - Mark R Robertson
Mark Robertson is the Founder and Creator of ReelSEO.com. Mark has had extensive experience in online marketing, particularly in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Local Search, Video Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow Mark on Twitter @markrrobertson

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