Many videos on the popular video hosting site YouTube are available in multiple qualities. Why is that you may ask? The video qualities depend largely on the source video that gets uploaded to YouTube by the user. This source video defines which video qualities the video gets encoded to. Youtube users then have the choice to view the video in all available qualities. That’s useful depending on how YouTube is accessed.
Internet users with a slow Internet connection may prefer to view videos in lower resolutions to avoid buffering pauses during playback. Users with high speed Internet, and users with big screens may want to view the videos in the best available quality instead.
Auto HD for YouTube is a Google Chrome extension that offers to load YouTube videos automatically in predefined quality settings. The user can define up to four different quality settings and prioritize them.
The extension will always try to load the YouTube video in the preferred quality, and use the remaining quality settings as fallbacks in case the video is not available in that quality.
The quality selection on YouTube happens in the background without user interaction. Available video qualities are 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p and default which equals 240p. Small screen and slow connection users may want to configure the extension for a lower quality setting, while high speed users may opt for 1080p whenever available.
The only other option offered by Auto HD for YouTube is the ability to configure whether the video player should automatically be widened or shrunk on YouTube.
Chrome users who would like to configure the video quality settings on YouTube find the extension at the official Google Chrome Extensions gallery.
Mozilla Firefox users who want a similar option in their browser can take a closer look at the Greasemonkey script YouTube HD Suite which adds the capabilities to the browser.
It adds the highest video quality available to each video that is displayed on YouTube as a visual indicator.
Update: The Google Chrome extension has been discontinued. Chrome users can download and use the Youtube HD Suite just like Firefox users can.
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