Sunday, April 06, 2008

YouTube HQ Audio tips: Stereo, mp4, 44.1 KHz download and save FLV, MP4 videos

YouTube has started to create better quality versions of many videos, adding links that say, "Watch this video in higher quality." Adding &fmt=6 to the end of any Youtube video's url will give you Youtube's new high quality setting.

Getting iPod compatible mp4s:
Using &fmt=18 generates an mp4 using h264 with AAC stereo, which is compatible with video iPods. Using fmt=18, you get a video transcoded from the original clip the user uploaded. The bitrate is lower on the mp4 version, but since the resolution is smaller it compensates. The h.264 codec has better looking videos at lower bitrates. We finally get stereo on youtube with the mp4 version. It has a widescreen 16/9 aspect ratio rather than 4/3.



If you want to download HQ videos from YouTube, use the Better YouTube Firefox Extension from LifeHacker.

Embed High Quality Youtube Clips

This code works fine to embed the mp4 version. The query string var is "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" specifying format 18.