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YouTube is finally making good on its promise to start encoding videos at higher resolutions. Select videos on the site are already available in 480x360 resolution -- it's not HD, but it is a step up from the old 320x240 format.
For the most part this change only affects newer videos and YouTube is rolling it out in a somewhat haphazard manner. Some the videos are identified on the site with a little link offering to take you to a higher res version, but if you want to see the high quality version by default here are a few ways to pull that off.
# Add <code>&fmt=18</code> to the end of a normal YouTube URL. If there's a high quality version available that will cause it to load.
# Firefox Add-on -- The team over at Lifehacker makes the [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6460 Better YouTube extension] for Firefox and the latest version of the add-on includes the URL hacking technique above (as well as some other goodies like the ability to stop movies from auto-playing).
# The Easily Overlooked Obvious Method -- If you're logged in to YouTube anyway, just head over to your account settings page and near the bottom you'll find a "Video Quality" option. Click that link and you'll land on a page where you can choose to always see the higher quality videos. Obviously this requires you to login to YouTube, so if you don't want to do that stick with one of the methods above.
Even at the higher quality, YouTube videos aren't going to look good on a HD TV. But for smaller monitors and laptops, they may be good enough to at least watch in full screen mode without the video turning the chunky moving blocks of color.
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