Force youtube embed to start in 720p

Question

There are a few methods suggested for doing this online, but none of them seem to work.

For example:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/youtube-in-720p

Answer 1

You can do this by adding a parameter &hd=1 to the video URL. That forces the video to start in the highest resolution available for the video. However you cannot specifically set it to 720p, because not every video has that hd ish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID&hd=1

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/player_parameters.html

UPDATE: as of 2014, hd is deprecated https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters?csw=1#Deprecated_Parameters

Answer 2

This is an embed example of video played in HD 1080.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://youtube.com/v/IplDUxTQxsE&vq=hd1080" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="1"></iframe>

Let's break apart the code:http://youtube.com/v/ video_id &vq=hd1080

Video id for that video: IplDUxTQxsE you will see this type of random code in the link of every YouTube video.

So far so good, this trick works for playing full HD videos directly on webpages!

You can change the quality to 720 too. &vq=hd720

Answer 3

In case you're still wondering how to do it, then add: &feature=youtu.be&hd=1 Actually now I checked, this works only when you're sending the URL to someone else, not on embed.