YouTube is the undisputed king of video sharing services. Although you are probably familiar with Youtube, here are five Youtube hacks/tips you may not be aware of.

View High Quality Video (If available) :If you have an YouTube account you can change your connection type to High Speed from here in order to be served higher quality videos. You can also click on High Quality video link if offered. Unfortunately on many occasions Youtube doesnt serve the high quality video or give the option to view it, even if it’s available. However you can force YouTube to serve the high quality version by simply appending the string “&fmt=18” to the video url.
Eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py8ytIfVCTw
would become http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py8ytIfVCTw&fmt=18>

If you are a Firefox or Opera user you can also try the greasemonkey script/userjs available here.

Bypass YouTube’s Country Limitation :Some videos on YouTube have country limitation (e.g. Beijing Olympics Channel is blocked in the US). However getting past YouTube ip address filter is ridiculously easy. You simply need to load the Video Player instead of the YouTube page. You can do this by using http://www.youtube.com/v/video_id instead of the standard youtube url.
Eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU (blocked outside US) would become http://www.youtube.com/v/I9ciR9qR1dU
via Hack5

Autoplay a Video : If you want your embedded video to start playing automatically, once again you can do so by simply modifying the url. In this case you need to append the string “&autoplay=1” to the url and remove everything before and after the embed tag.
Eg <object width=”425″ height=”355″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/py8ytIfVCTw&hl=en”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/py8ytIfVCTw&hl=en” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=&http://www.pallab.net/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=226#8221;355″></embed></object> would change to <embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/py8ytIfVCTw&hl=en&autoplay=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”355″></embed>
Just a word of caution though. Use this with discretion as autoplaying videos can annoy your readers if improperly used.

Loop a Video : Similarly if you wish to loop a video add the string “ &loop=1” to the end of the url.

Disable related videos in YouTube’s embedded Player : Many webmasters may want to disable related videos in YouTube’s embedded player since it encourages the reader to navigate away from the current website. Once again the solution is as simple as appending the string “rel=0” to the video URL.

Instead of manually modifying the embed code you can let a new service called VTubeTools do it. VTubeTools.com allows you to customize your YouTube player with a few clicks. You can resize the player, autostart the video, loop the video and enable high quality version. It also allows you to set custom background (you can just change the colours or even use your own background picture). Detailed tutorial is available here.

Update (12th October) - Embed a Part of a YouTube Video I came across another neat Youtube trick today. Youtube supports a parameter called “start” that allows start playing an embedded video after a specified number of seconds. For example if the interesting part of the video begins only after 20 seconds you need to use the code &start=20. Example

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=20“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=20” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Alternatively you can use the service Splicd to extract only a certain portion of a Youtube video.

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