How to: Tweak YouTube embeds for HD playback

Several readers have e-mailed me and asked for instructions on how to take their HD YouTube videos and embed them elsewhere. As I mentioned before, this isn't an officially sanctioned feature, and as such, the embed code you get on these video pages will still yield the lower-quality, non-widescreen clip.

Needless to say, this is completely unacceptable.

The good news is that you only need to make a few changes to the stock embed code get the job done. Here's what to do:

Step 1: Copy this code and paste it to wherever you intend to embed the video:

<object width="630" height="380"> <param value="http://www.youtube.com/v/YOURVIDEOCODEHERE&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" name="movie" /><param value="window" name="wmode" /> <param value="true" name="allowFullScreen" /><embed width="630" height="380" wmode="window" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/YOURVIDEOCODEHERE&ap=%2526fmt%3D22"></embed></object>

Step 2: Grab the direct link to your video. In case you've never done this before, it can be found to the right of the video player on YouTube or from your browser's address bar.

Step 3: Tweak the embed code. The finishing touch involves making a simple change to embed's URL source code to direct it to the HD version. To do this, you simply need to copy the alphanumeric gobbledygook at the end of the link you grabbed in step 2 and paste it into the part between /v/ and the & symbol in the embed code. For simplicity's sake I've labeled this "YOURVIDEOCODEHERE" in the embed code.

That's it--you're done, and all you had to do was use copy and paste twice! The end result is this: