Google announced last November that YouTube would soon make the upgrade to less-grainy video. This has been a big problem with YouTube according to many publishers and viewers.
I am a huge proponent of news orgs using YouTube to promote their video. I understand all the ramifications for “losing rights” for republishing and selling video content. Some thought must be put into monetizing online video, but the promotional value of YouTube is too powerful to sneeze at while news sites continue to cage their video on their own sites.
Online Journalism Blog showed last week that adding shareable features to online video can lead to more views of a video. But this is all besides the point.
The real schpiel is that YT users can now check out the HD versions of YouTube videos.
If you append &fmt=6 to the URL of a YouTube video, you should get better quality videos. Note that this only works for a small number of videos.
If you append &fmt=18, YouTube downloads the video as a MP4 (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480×360
Ok, so what, so what. Viewers can now view some YT videos in higher quality if you do some tweaking to video URLs. Big Deal.
Well, the Goog offered up another interesting treat! Try out this Greasemonkey script to automatically view HD-ready YouTube videos in higher quality.
Note on the lack of posts: I’m currently studying Landing Page optimization, SEO ad-writing and other SEM/online marketing techniques and strategy, which is pulling me away from my normal posting. Hope to have some things on how it can apply to online news sites soon!
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Smooth out the grain please. The greasemonkey script is a treat! So much nuance is lost with low quality videos.
Wishing you happy landing on LPO.