If you are looking to download some high-res video clips from YouTube for your next presentation, try this easy trick that will only display high quality videos in the search results.
Go to Google.com, type your search phrase and append the following paramters your search query.
site:youtube.com "watch in normal quality watch in high quality"
To illustrate this with a real example, a search for "cnn hologram" related videos on YouTube would look something like this on Google:
cnn hologram "watch in normal quality watch in high quality" site:youtube.com
This works because YouTube adds a small "watch in high quality" link beneath their video player if the video you are watching is available as high resolution.
When you click that "high quality" link, it is replaced by "watch in normal quality" so the two strings are really close in the HTML source and that helps us filter low quality videos from search.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/video/search-high-resolution-youtube-videos/5228/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
That is just great :D
Do you know how to embed a high quality youtube video on a blog?
Written by OnlineGodfather on 11.05.08
Really really useful indeed.
Written by Gofree on 11.05.08
WOW Great idea. Youtube videos are generally not high quality and that is the reason other video sharing sites are getting famous.
Written by Sohail on 11.05.08
or append &fmt=18 to the url and that will do the trick as long as the video was uploaded in a higher quality
Written by dennis on 11.05.08
We can download any video with High quality through “file2hd” by simply just pasting the you tube URL and downloading it as MP4 quality format.
Written by venkat on 11.05.08
This doesn’t actually work. Try replacing “CNN hologram” with anything else and you will see what I mean. The search simply returns all videos on youtube that Google would return anyway.
Oh how I wish YouTube made HQ a searchable parameter…
Written by Thelonious Dump on 12.15.08
ps the mp4 link is the same thing….no difference in quality vs flv duh, HQ is actual higher resolution
Written by booo on 01.07.09