YouTube is making a mystery announcement tomorrow, Erick Schonfeld writes at TechCrunch. Schonefeld's guess is that it may be a partnership with Hulu, but the folks over at Mahalo have another interesting theory. They discovered a new link below a YouTube player today that flips playback over to a higher-quality copy of the video on this page. You can visit that page, for an Amy Sedaris interview with David Letterman, or see the screencapture from Mahalo, embedded below.
Update: YouTube Expands API Set - Including Upload, Player APIs (this was the actual announcement tonight, but perhaps high quality video is still to come)
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Posted by: Cory | March 11, 2008 9:31 PMMy prediction will be creating something like Seesmic service.
I'd hope they're switching the entire site to Silverlight 2 video, but that wouldn't happen since they're owned by Google.
Posted by: Dan Grossman | March 11, 2008 10:09 PMThat would be great--most of the videos are pretty low quality on youtube even though the author did their best to ensure a higher quality. What I wish they'd update, though, is their ability to maintain an embedded video on another website. I've heard from quite a few people that the embed codes stop working after about a month or so. It could be the website host tweaking out, of course, but it's still a bummer to have happen.
Posted by: Pam | March 11, 2008 10:11 PMyup, throw &fmt=6 on the end of the url and you'll see the higher quality (h264 I think) version if that vid's been re-encoded.
Posted by: .jonah | March 11, 2008 11:28 PMAwesome dig...indeed its going to be HD
Posted by: kuldeep | March 12, 2008 1:17 AMI'm viewing videos right now in High Def.
Posted by: D | March 12, 2008 1:42 AMI have a screenshot as well.
Here is link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1zgFlCw8Aw&eurl
Posted by: D | March 12, 2008 1:43 AMI have a blog post about how you can watch ALL YouTube videos in High Quality by simply adding some code to the URL. Copy & paste is all you need to know!
http://chvnx.com/2008/03/youtube-hack.html
Posted by: chvnx | March 29, 2008 12:14 AM