youtube HQ videos not captured by RMC

**FairUse** · 05-14-2009, 05:57 AM

Keep in mind that HD and HQ are totally different things. The original poster is asking about HQ, not HD.

"HQ" videos on YouTube are actually Quicktime mp4 files. A lot of people don't understand or even believe this. But it is 100% true, YouTube's player plays .mp4. When videos are uploaded to YouTube, they are converted to both .flv and .mp4. If a video does not have the "HQ" button, you can append "&fmt=18" (without the quotes) to the URL to play the .mp4 version.

I'm not sure if Replay Media Catcher handles Quicktime properly or not.

**RichPasco** · 05-14-2009, 06:29 AM

Yesterday, I used Tasha's trick to capture two YouTube videos:

Both of them have a button at the bottom that says HD.
Neither of them has a button that says HQ.

But when I used Tasha's trick, of the resulting files, #1 had extension MP4 and #2 had extension FLV. In both cases, the files were the high-resolution versions of the videos.

I played both in Winamp (with additional CODECs as required for FLV and MP4 video). At your suggestion I later verified that Quicktime could handle the MP4 (but not the FLV).

- Rich

**FairUse** · 05-14-2009, 04:04 PM

"HD" is simply a higher resolution, and there are still two streams, one encoded as FLV (flash video) and one as MP4 (Quicktime). MP4 is a superior encoding method.

I have no idea which stream is actually displayed when you play the video in YouTube's player. But YouTube does take the time and bandwidth to stream both. A lot of aspects of YouTube are quirky and don't work quite right, so it doesn't suprise me that YouTube streams two video feeds when only one can be played at a time.

Anyway, if you have a video that has a "HD" button but not "HQ", you can simply append "&fmt=18" (without the quotes) to the URL to get the YouTube player to actually play the standard resolution Quicktime (MP4) version of the video. You will now also see the "HQ" button show up.