Embed YouTube Videos in High Quality [&fmt=18]

To watch a YouTube video in high quality on YouTube website itself, it is as easy as clicking the “watch in high quality” link, provided it’s available. Even when it is not available, you can use the &fmt=18 trick, which will work on most videos.

But how do you embed a YouTube video in high quality? You can do so by using the HQ Embed Code Generator. Just paste the YouTube video ID of the video you want to embed in high quality into the input field and click “Create Code“—an embed code of high quality video will be generated.

Low Quality

High Quality

Bookmark HQ Embed Code Generator, Open in Sidebar

Since the generator has no styling or whatever, it will open beautifully in Firefox sidebar. For future use, you can bookmark the generator and launch it in your Firefox sidebar without leaving YouTube website itself.

To do so, bookmark the generator, then right click on the bookmark, select “Properties“, then select “Load this bookmark in the sidebar“. The next time you open the bookmark, it will open neatly in the sidebar.

Prefer altering the embed code manually instead of using the generator?

To do it manually, you have to modify the embed code copied from YouTube.

1. Locate the YouTube URLs in the embed code, there are 2. Bolded in the below sample code:

<object width="560" height="345"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7HPfAhA2FBU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7HPfAhA2FBU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="345"></embed></object>

2. In each of them, add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” at the back of it. It’d look something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/v/7HPfAhA2FBU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18

3. Your embed code would then look something like this:

<object width="560" height="345"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7HPfAhA2FBU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7HPfAhA2FBU&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="345"></embed></object>