We’ve talked about it a number of times before – YouTube is a terrific resource for publishing corporate video quickly, cost-effectively (free), and to a wide audience. One of the major problems with YouTube for creators of corporate video is the trade-off between video quality and speed of delivery. If you embed the standard “360p” low-def video, you’re presented with a lower quality audio transcode that can make for muddy dialogue in anything less than ideal conditions.  While the “480p” version of your video includes the original, full quality audio, as of this writing there’s no way to embed that version of your file so that it plays by default.

So what can you do as an online video producer?  Cheat!

Since YouTube DOES let you embed high-definition video with outstanding audio, a great trick is to create heavily compressed high definition versions of your video, upload to YouTube, and then simply display them in a lower definition embed with high definition playback enabled. You get great audio, better than 480p quality video, and load/stream times comparable to 360p.

Again, those steps:

1. Prepare your original video in high definition.
2. Create a heavily compressed h.264 version of your video in either 1080p or 720p (we always create both and then examine the resultant file sizes to see if the tradeoff in quality is justified by faster loading).
3. Upload your video to YouTube
4. Embed the high definition version of your video using a low definition player.  This “squishes” your video down to a size where compression artifacts will be less (if at all) noticeable.

Here’s a sample:

<object width="660" height="405"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TrwtFU3vkYA&hl=en_US&fs=1&hd=1&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TrwtFU3vkYA&hl=en_US&fs=1&hd=1&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="660" height="405"></embed></object>

Notice the sections highlighted in red.  I’ve added ‘&hd=1′ to the end of both versions of the URL to trigger high definition playback.  Also note the width and height.  In this example, I used the embed code from YouTube for the 660 x 405 px player and appended ‘&hd=1′.  I could also have used the code for the high definition version and simply substituted ‘width=”660″ height=”405″ for the high definition player dimensions.  Either works.