YouTube adds (some) high quality video switches

A few days ago, Boris pinged me that YouTube was showing a maintenance sign and that I should keep an eye on it. Turns out he’s right, since I noticed a video on Mahalo showing that YouTube did add higher quality. The guide note says:

Quality refers to video on YouTube that has a higher resolution than the standard YouTube resolution. In November of 2007 YouTube announced that they would feature higher resolution videos in 2008. It has been speculated that YouTube will announce the official launch of this feature in March of 2008, but it has not been confirmed. Higher resolution versions of most of the videos on the popular video sharing site can be seen on the site using an address bar trick that accesses the higher resolution versions.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi2TL5FRVrk]

Simple research show that it actually is true. Check it out yourself by clicking on this image:

This blog reports on the recent activities of YouTube to make a higher quality of videos possible. It’s actually going on for two weeks already, says Cybernetnews. I can only agree with the last statement in that post:

I can’t wait for YouTube to start rolling this out to all of their videos, and hopefully they’ll add a button to their site where you can easily switch between the low and high quality versions on a per-video basis.