Whenever possible, I always link to and embed HD versions of YouTube videos. I do this primarily for the better 152kbps audio quality. YouTube has made some changes recently that have made it more difficult to link to and embed HD videos, but it's still doable.

Link to HD YouTube Videos

Linking directly to a high definition (HD) version of a YouTube video used to be done by adding "&fmt=" and 35, 22, or 37 at the end of the link. This no longer works, but you can still use "&hd=1", which will link to the 720p version of a video, if available. Here is an example of a link with "&hd=1" added to the end of it:


The following will also work:


Thanks to commentor KarDave for pointing out that you can link directly to the popout version of a 1080p video. It won't be in the normal YouTube layout and will be just the video at full browser dimensions. The link is:


Replace VIDEO_ID with the ID of the video, naturally. If you leave the &vq=hd1080 out, or the video does not support 1080, it will default to 720 (if available). You can also use 3rd party embedded players to have more control over the playback, but that won't be covered here.

Embed HD YouTube Videos

By default, YouTube's embed code will not allow you to make an embedded video default to a higher quality than its size. For example, even if Play in HD is selected, a 640 x 360 video will default to 360p quality. Here are the example 16 x 9 aspect ratio videos and their respective default qualities when embedded:

Resolution	Default quality
560 x 315	360p
640 x 360	360p
853 x 480	480p
1280 x 720	720p

YouTube's logic for not letting you default to higher quality resolutions is simply that you shouldn't need to. If the embedded player size is 640 x 360, you shouldn't need a 1280x 720 quality video. Of course that ignores the compression quality and other issues, not the least of which being that audio bitrate is dependent on the video quality you choose.

Old embed code to the rescue

Thankfully, you can still get smaller resolution videos to play in HD (720p if available) by default by using the old embed code and modifying it a little. First, open up the embed dialog on a YouTube video page by clicking on Share, then Embed. Once there, follow the instructions in the image below:



In case the image doesn't work, click Play in HD, then click Use old embed code, then change the resolution to the size you want, then remove the two occurrences of version=3. Or, you can just use this code (change the two occurrences of VIDEO_ID and width/height to your desired values):


I hope this will allow you to at least embed your videos to playback at 720p by default (if available). For further reading on how the new embed code works, as well as some interesting information on YouTube players, see my post on embedding YouTube videos.

Related articles:

• Link to a specific time in a YouTube video
• YouTube Audio Quality Bitrate

Tags	youtube   how to