An article on Wired yesterday alerted me to something I’ve been waiting for for a long time. High Quality H.264 videos on YouTube. [Update: YouTube have now announced a widescreen player.] Medium quality stereo H.264 vidoes have been available for some time using the fmt=18 trick [example] and you can even download them with an easy-to-use Firefox toolbar add-on but the availability of the 1280×720, possibly original-format versions, is a great step forward and with a tweak of that download toolbar, you can download them too which allows netbooks and other ultra mobile PC’s to play the files that would otherwise struggle trying to play  through the built-in H.264-enabled flash player. (Video below)

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