You Tube videos....

[Loosehead]

Ok Related to another question I asked yesterday. Why is the quality of you tube videos always terrible? Is it some sort of hybrid form for quick viewing or something? and is it possible to download the videos somehow? ie a decent quality version.

[Llamatron]

An increase in quality would also increase the size of the video. Bigger files mean longer to upload, longer to download and more storage space needed on the servers.
So I guess it's trade off between quality and size.

If you want to download it I think there's a video downloader add-on available for FireFox but you'll need something that'll play flash videos. VLC plays pretty much anything.

But as for downloading higher quality versions then I'm afraid you're stuck.

[fo3nix]

As llamatron says, it's due to pricing. It costs money for a site to send you videos, so you can imagine that youtube's bandwidth bill is pretty high (last I heard it was around the �1million/month region).

They convert your video into a flash video file (perhaps the main reason it's so successful, because it works so easily), but the algorithms they use are pretty poor and so the quality is usually noticebly poorer than a similar-sized video file in h.264 format for instance (a quicktime movie, for example).

Goto keepvid:
http://keepvid.com/

And you'll be able to download a .flv video file (flash video). As llamatron also says, vlc will happily play this.

[Loosehead]

OK thanks guys