YOUTUBE GOES WIDESCREEN!

"Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback from you about what you'd like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That's why today we're excited to announce a bigger YouTube player.

We're expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don't worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player..."

How To Embed High Quality YouTube Video

Viewers can now choose to watch YouTube videos in High Quality mode. Technically speaking, the videos are being streamed at a much higher resolution, specifically 480x360 and encoded in MP4 format (H.264 with AAC audio).

On the other hand, users discovered that videos cannot be embedded in High Quality mode, neither do the video-host provide any help on that. So today, I am going to teach you a very simple hack that will work on all blogs/websites, followed by a side-by-side comparison:

1) As usual, copy the default embed code provided by YouTube


2) Find the 2 URL in "param" & "embed", replace the part in green with &ap=%2526fmt%3D18

http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxxx&hl=en&fs=1

You will find 2 such lines in the default embed code, the xxx is the unqiue video ID and the &hl=en&fs=1 being the default query string:


A hacked URL should look like this:

http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxxx&ap=%2526fmt%3D18


Normal Quality version:



High Quality version: