The blurry, grainy, tiny YouTube video you know and tolerate will soon become a thing of the past as Google’s billion-dollar baby is currently in the midst of rolling out out higher quality options for your video clip-ripping pleasure.  Of course 480×360 isn’t that much better than the old 320×240 videos we’re all familiar with, but hey, at least it’s something, right?  Here are a few ways to get that bigger bootleg copy of the “Mr. Plow” episode of The Simpsons everyone loves.  Can you see the difference?

There are a few different options to get the good (or at least better) version of the YouTube clips to display, other than clicking on the ‘display higher resolution’ button where available on YouTube itself.  There’s a simple URL hack you can do in your browser of choice, and a Firefox extension for people who are too lazy to add six characters in by hand.  Displaying the larger quality video in your website via the embed code is quite a bit more difficult (for now at least), but it also can be done with some significant embed code changes helpfully listed by Wired.

If I used Firefox still, I’d definitely download the extension.  That’s right, I made the switch, then went back to Internet Explorer (at least at home) once IE added tabbed browsing.  The memory hogging aspect of FireFox was too much to overcome for me, even though I loved the various add-ons dedicated solely to World of Warcraft searches.

Tags: youtube, hacks, firefox extensions

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