Last week I mentioned that adding &fmt=18 to a Youtube URL, or &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the embed code URLs allows you to view and embed Youtube clips in nice looking 480x360 resolution, encoded with the H.264 codec. The result is a much better playback experience than the standard 320x240 sorenson encoded clips, but a post today on webmonkey gives us another tweak that can produce even better results for some videos.

Above is an example of Collin Cunningham's brilliant LED investigation in high def.

By changing that fmt variable to &fmt=22 or tacking on &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the embed URLs—that's right, turn it up twice past 11—Youtube will kick out compatible videos at a whopping 720p resolution.

Here's some example embed code:

<object width="600" height="362"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/P3PDLsJQcGI&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D22"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/P3PDLsJQcGI&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="600" height="362"></embed></object>

The only downside to embedding videos this way is that it really raises the bandwidth requirement for viewers. On my home connection, it can take several seconds before the video begins playback, and depending on how well my wireless is behaving, it's not uncommon that the download rate will be slower thank playback, requiring quite a bit of pre-buffering. On the other hand, some videos are just worth the wait.

How To: Watch YouTube Movies in Full 720p HD Glory

Here's an example of a normal embedded Youtube video, borrowed from Patti Schiendelman's Gakken Mechamo Inchworm post.

Back in march, it was discovered that when you view a video directly on Youtube, you could add a "&fmt=18" to the URL to enable a higher quality, higher resolution stream which is encoded with the H.264 codec.

To make this work in an embedded video, however, you need a slightly different hack. After pasting the embed code into a blog post, adjust the two video URLs (one in a param tag and one as the src parameter in the embed tag) by adding "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" to the end.

For example, the above video embed becomes:

<object width="600" height="475"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iMQBKkDJY2c&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iMQBKkDJY2c&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="600" height="475"></embed></object>

And here's the result:

The still frame before the video is played is the exact same over-compressed image, but when a user clicks play, they will get a nice surprise. Instead of 320x240 video encoded with the Sorenson codec, the video will come in at a resolution of 480x360, encoded with the superior H.264 codec.

Embedding High Quality Youtube Videos [via Kottke]
View YouTube in high-res

Philipp Lenssen, author of Google Apps Hacks mentioned a really cool YouTube hack on Google Blogoscoped:

A Car's Life is an interactive Arcade-style game using YouTube. To make it through a given level, all you need to do is click a button which appears. The video makes use of YouTube annotations, which can be linked to other YouTube videos. It's a bit like the 1980s Dragon's Lair in some respects: it has animations and somewhat stretches the limits of its medium, but it also has rather low playability. Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games - perhaps like Tube Adventures - might be more interesting in YouTube (anyone wants to write a YouTube-API-based video adventure export functionality for QML, the XML-based CYOA language?)

Christopher Finke wrote a Firefox extension called YouTube Comment Snob that hides the 90% drivel which graces the comment area beneath your favorite videos. It's basically a YouTube spam filter that allows you to optionally weed out comments based on characteristics like excessive (or lack of) capitalization, profanity, over-punctuation and a high incidence of spelling errors.

I'd be so stoked if someone took this idea and applied to blog comments in general. Just a quick glance at Slashdot, Drupal, Digg, Blogger, and Moveable Type shows that you can probably target a majority of sites by filtering through block-level elements beneath DIVs that have an id or class containing "comment".

YouTube Comment Snob [via BoingBoing]

I caught this self-referential tutorial on YouTube today which walks you through the basics of the YouTube API. It appears to be quite simple to develop Javascript or Flash applications that can control or interact with the YouTube player, or even completely reskin the interface.

What I didn't know until recently was that the API has provisions for allowing your application to upload videos and post comments. You can even authenticate users and allow them to interact with the YouTube backend through your private application. It looks like you can do just about everything programatically except remove the YouTube watermark on the video.

YouTube Developer's Guide
Developer API Blog

Next time you're trying to explain the importance of web standards in modern web design and development, just let this video do the talking for you.

The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) is back with another marketing rap. This time he describes how web standards and proper design can affect the ranking and conversion of pages on your site.

I know this isn't the usual fare here, but I feel I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't include it in our compendium of all things hack.

YouTube has been testing higher bitrate encodings of it videos, which you can see if you add a &fmt=8 or &fmt=16 to the video url. Historically, all videos have been delivered to the lowest common denominator: sorenson encoded 320x240. By adding &fmt=6 to the URL, the video is served up in 448x336 resolution and I'm guessing it's using the VP6 codec (can anyone confirm?). &fmt=18 gives you the iPhone-style MP4 stream.

What videos will actually look better in the higher res format is completely dependent on the material that was uploaded to YouTube, obeying the rules of garbage in garbage out. I've looked at a number of videos where you can't really tell the difference between the low and high-res versions, presumably because the uploaded video was already heavily compressed or pre-scaled to 320x240. There are a few, however, that are strikingly better, such as the skateboarding dog above.

A greasemonkey script is available which will cause Firefox to automatically load the fmt=18 version, if available. A quick install and you can be wasting time at twice the bitrate.

Watch High-Resolution YouTube Videos - [via] Link
YouTube HD Greasmonkey Script - Link

The latest version of Google Earth added a layer for geotagged YouTube videos. So far, it seems like a lot of people are using this feature for documenting landmarks, attractions and live recordings of things like music, sporting events, backpacking trips, urban skateboarding, etc.

If you have a geospatially relevant video that you want to put on the map, it's pretty easy. Just upload your video to YouTube, open the "Date and Map Options" tab in the video information panel, and drag the marker to the correct location. You can zoom in to get a more precise location, or just enter the lat/lon manually with the following format: "geo:lat=yy.yyyy geo:lon=xx.xxxx".

Out of the box, Windows Mobile devices can only play WMV files. Formats like Flash video or Quicktime are not supported. Using the open source media player TCPMP and some Pocket IE tweaks, however, you can view the FLV video content available on several popular video sites like YouTube and Google Video, right on your WM5 or WM6 Pocket PC or Smartphone.

For all you Tube-aholics, this is it! You now have direct, unfettered access to Youtube, Google Video & Veoh, in all their glory. Install the CABs listed below, go directly to these websites, and click on a video to play. That's it :)

Even better, you can also use TCPMP to watch H.264 MP4 / iPod encoded videos. With a large enough SD card, you should be able to use the same MP4 encoded videos on your Treo that you play from iTunes or on your iPod or iPhone.

Correction:
dankirkpatrick comments that the device referenced in the MP4-to-Treo article at jaydryden.net is actually a PalmOS device, and not the lookalike Windows Mobile Treo 700w. TCPMP is available for Windows Mobile, though, so I'll try and put together some instructions for this and verify that it works (it should). The encoding info on the Palm article should still apply, you just need to install TCPMP for WM, not for PalmOS.

Full Youtube and Google Video access - Link
Watching MP4 video on Windows Mobile PalmOS using TCPMP - Link
Wikipedia entry on TCPMP - Link

You'll probably never have the desire or need to download and watch a YouTube video on a text-only console, but doesn't it make you feel better knowing that it can be done?

The trick is to use the AAlib ascii image library as an output device for mplayer, using the -vo parameter:

mplayer -vo aa video.flv

Mplayer will decode the flv frames, process them with AAlib and print luscious video to your console window. At 80x25, it's almost 2 whole kilopixels of resolution! [via]

Watch Videos in ASCII Art - Link
Linux Multimedia Hacks - Link
AAlib ASCII Graphics Library- Link

A Series of Tubes wiki - Link.

Here's an online service that will transcode FLVs for you into several common formats, such as AVI/DivX, MOV/MPEG4, 3GP, etc. I've only had a chance to try it on a couple videos, but it seems to work well. You can submit a YouTube URL or a direct link to an FLV and it will kick out a recompressed version that you can easily play on your desktop, iPod or PSP. -Link.

They've also released the trasncoder source under the LGPL, which you can grab over at sourceforge and use in your own transcoding project. Nice! -Link.

Related:

• Howto: Download Youtube and Google Videos

There are a few different ways to get at the FLV file that the video player application is downloading. Safari users can use the Window->Activities feature to locate and download flv files as they are playing, and Joshua Kinberg put together a couple nice Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that make downloading pretty simple.

I was looking for an easy solution that works cross-browser, and this is what's working for me: 2 javascript URLs, based on the original code from Joshua's Greasemonkey scripts, that you can add to your bookmarks list.

Google Video Download Bookmark (right-click, copy address and save to bookmarks)
Download Google Video

Youtube Download Bookmark (right-click, copy address and save to bookmarks)
Download Youtube Video

Don't click on those URLs here. Just get them into your browser's bookmarks. The next time you are watching a video on Google Video or Youtube, you can click the appropriate bookmark and a window will pop up that will begin downloading the FLV! The Youtube file will be named "get_video" after it is downloaded. Just rename it and add a ".flv" extension and you should be in good shape.

Related:

• VLC - Video Lan Client (plays flvs nicely and it's cross-platform)
• Youtube and Google Video Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox

After rolling out his many excellent Coverpop visualizations (but before getting tapped by Yahoo! to work on similar cool stuff for them), Flickr Hacks coauthor Jim Bumgardner created this amazingly fun kaleidoscope viewer for YouTube videos.

Just plug in any YouTube URL (or choose one of the nine preset movies provided by Jim) to return the moving picture as a tumbling, repeated, symmetrical pattern. The screen capture in this post uses my joking Knowledge of Innovators test video as a target.

If this whets your appetite for more, here are a couple of Jim's other ventures into YouTube hacking:

• A Year of YouTube Submissions
• YouTube Meets CoverPop