How in the Tech

Automatically Select Video Quality on Youtube

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 7, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Internet, Multimedia

In the beginning, Youtube allowed users to upload their videos in a resolution of 320×240, a rather low res even at the time. It wasn’t long before a new video quality was introduced – high quality at a resolution of 480×360. Most recently, Youtube has begun offering 720p content, otherwise known as HD quality. With three levels of quality it isn’t hard to become confused as to what you are actually watching. Worse, Youtube does a poor of even informing you about the various levels of quality available. More often than not you want to be seeing the highest quality encoding provided and really get your money’s worth out of your broadband connection.

Youtube HQ is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that alleviates a lot of the guess work on Youtube. Once installed the script provides a few scenarios that are quite useful. First, you can force playback of a video in it’s highest quality available. The screen will resize to fit the higher resolution content automatically.

Second, and perhaps less useful to the masses, you can force playback to the lowest quality available. Why would anyone be interested in that? Simply, it’s an excellent alternative for the low bandwidth individuals. For me, I use it on my netbook when it’s tethered to the 3G network where bandwidth is metered but not to the point where Youtube is worthless.