Web Talk

If you have tried YouTube at least once, you know how disappointing it is to watch a video sometimes. No matter what people upload, YouTube automatically re-sizes any format such WMV, AVI, MOV and MPG into a more handy 320 x 240 pixels, encodes the video into Flash at a data rate of about 250kbps, and converts the audio into MP3 (22.050KHz monophonic). This means that a barely acceptable video, becomes crappy on YouTube. Anyway there is a little trick, which is unknown to most people, which lets you improve the video quality, letting you enjoy YouTube even more. As you know a video on YouTube gets an address like this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzdGtFqtW0. This is the address YouTube gives to its videos after being resized. If you add the address this little code &fmt=6 (changing in this way the address into: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzdGtFqtW0&fmt=6) you will be able to enjoy the same video at a resolution of 448 x336 pixels. You can get even more (but you need a very fast Internet connection) by adding this code instead: &fmt=18 (changing the address into: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzdGtFqtW0&fmt=18). In this way YouTube will deliver you the same video but in a MP4 format (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480×360 resolution. Keep in mind that this trick doesn’t work for all Youtube videos.