Well, it shows how fast things change in the Web 2.0 world when I can make a post on a Wednesday that is rendered obsolete by Friday! …And so it goes that it is no longer necessary to hack the YouTube embed code to offer the high-quality (HQ) version of YouTube videos on web pages and blogs. YouTube now does it for you by offering the option to watch a video in high quality IN the embedded player itself.
An “HQ” button now pops up inside the embedded video player whenever a high quality video is played. Hovering over the button will allow you to see that clicking it will offer the video in higher quality, as seen here below:
(Pressing this “HQ” button yields this higher-quality version below.
Any “fuzziness” you see is a factor of the screen captured image):
Note that this “HQ” button does not appear until you’ve actually pressed Play on the video. Once the video has started, hovering over the bottom right corner will reveal the menu pop-up containing this “HQ” button. Clicking it then reloads the video in the higher quality mode, and it does so without losing your place in the video. Similarly, if a slower Internet connection causes the high-quality version to appear choppy, pressing the “HQ” button a second time will bring it back to the normal quality.
In playing with this new option today, here are some other things I learned:
I mentioned in last week’s post that you may now change your YouTube account settings to always play either the high quality or HD versions of videos if/when they are available. When I stated this, however, I said that this was only true when watching videos ON the YouTube site (not when embedded off-site). It seems this has also changed in that if your settings on YouTube are such that you always get the HQ version by default, then that is what you’ll also get on embedded videos outside of YouTube.
Again, to change those settings, when logged in at YouTube.com, simply go to Account ==> Playback Setup, and then choose the default setting for viewing videos:
This way, even on the “High Quality Before” video in my last post (which was embedded without the snippet of “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ to make it high quality), if your default playback settings are set to always play higher-quality videos (the last choice above), it will do so by default even on my blog. However, if you’re set to never play higher-quality video (the middle or 2nd option above), the video will play in normal quality by default and the “HQ” button will offer it in high quality.
Either way, the point to take away from this is that you no longer need the “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ snippet of code to have your video come up in high quality. The only way this now helps is to override someone’s settings from within their YouTube account.
[I figured this out by changing my YouTube account settings to the middle option above (watch in low quality by default) and found that no matter what, the default was high-quality when the snippet of code was added to my embeds.]
The question then becomes: why would you want to override someone’s wish to not have your video appear choppy and slow to load if they have a slow Internet connection? (Although you could argue that perhaps people just don’t know they can choose high-quality settings over on YouTube, in which case, for the time being, you could still use the code hack.)
Instead, I think the best thing to do is to remind your blog and website visitors to whom you’ll be offering embedded YouTube videos that they should make sure their default settings over at YouTube allow for high-quality playbacks (send them to those playback settings above).
Which leads me to ask: Does anyone know what the default is on YouTube before anyone has even gone in to change their Playback settings? I’m assuming YouTube won’t make the change for us, but perhaps will make the first option the default — that is, to choose dynamically based upon someone settings. ? Any feedback on this would be useful.
I’m also interested in everyone’s thoughts on whether or not you’ll attempt to override your visitors’ playback settings by including the “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ code anyway.
As to whether or not HD will appear as an option in embedded videos, that has yet to be seen. I imagine, however, the answer to that is NO given the viewing difficulties it presents even with a higher-speed Internet connections. For the moment, it is just high-quality video that no longer needs a code hack to present.
Thanks, YouTube, for the nice change! (Only next time, I would prefer a little notice.) 
I’ll be interested to see if/when YouTube decides to make this information known on its blog. For now, it’s still not being widely discussed.
Read more over at CrunchGear.