Wired is reporting that YouTube now has a 720p-ish (reports vary on what resolution it truely is, but it’s sure good) video playback support. Even more important, the audio is stereo instead of mono (you can really hear the improved quality).

YouTube’s default video resolution is utter crap (not sure what the resolution is) and the existing higher quality video was 480×360. This new video resolution is 2-3 times as good as the previous “high quality” resolution.

To prove it, here’s some sample videos. The difference is more apparent if you click the fullscreen button, especially if you have a large monitor. Make sure to also have your speakers or headphones on to notice the improved audio quality.

YouTube Default (Low Quality)

YouTube’s Previous High Quality

YouTube’s New HD Quality

I have added support to my Video Quicktags plugin but note that if a video does not have the HD quality version available (99% or more don’t), it will drop back to the lowest quality format. As a result, I don’t recommend making the HD format your default on your blog. Instead, set the quality to 22 like this:

[youtube width="630" height="380" quality="22"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY[/youtube]

Viper’s Video Quicktags works fine, but will need a styling update for it’s admin page.

WordPress Admin Bar will need a fair amount of work. Yes I’m aware it’s fairly broken at the moment.

The rest should probably work fine as they’re fairly simple. If not, please post on that plugin’s homepage with full details.

Do you like Viper’s Video Quicktags? If so, please vote for it in the WPMU.org plugin competition. Thanks!

I’ve released a decent sized update to my Video Quicktags plugin that incorporates many features requested by users after the release of 6.0.x.

• YouTube: Can now choose between high quality FLV and high quality MP4 formats.
• FLV: Bundled skins.
• FLV: Improvements on how custom colors are set.
• TinyMCE: Can now choose what line number to display the buttons on.
• TinyMCE: Automatic browser cache breaking when the plugin is (de)activated or the line number is changed.
• General: SWFObject calls moved to bottom of posts rather than theme footer.
• General: Admin notice warning about automatic plugin upgrade breaking SWF files, etc. (ASCII vs. binary).
• General: Ability to set custom feed text via settings page.
• General: Image pre-cache URL fix.
• General: Settings page improvements for users without Javascript.
• General: More translations and translators added to credits page.
• General: Redid admin warning message for users without the head hook.
• Flash: Aliased “kml_flashembed” shortcode and “movie” parameter now used if it’s there. This is to support Anarchy Media Player.
• Other various bug fixes.

If you find any bugs, please report them via my support forums or the plugin’s homepage. Thanks!

I’ve just released Disable Trackbacks, a plugin I’ve been using for a while now.

The vast, vast majority of pings sent from other sites are done via pingbacks, not via the old trackback system (I think I’ve gotten like 3 legitimate ones this year or something). However, spammers just love them to death and is pretty much the only ping system they use. So, I wrote this plugin a week or so ago and enabled it on my blog. I’ve gone from a few thousand spams a day to next 0-5 a day. A worthy tradeoff if you ask me (ignoring the couple legitimate ones a year to avoid literally hundreds of thousands of spams).

I also run Cookies For Comments to avoid regular comment spam. In order to post a cookie comment on my site, you must have stylesheets and cookies enabled. Since this is a personal website that isn’t mission critical, I can make that requirement.

Finally Defensio picks up any spams that make it though which are mainly pingbacks from spam blogs (aka splogs).

Spam problem solved, at least for now…

Yes, that’s right — 1-2 months, 3200+ lines of code, and countless cans of Dr. Pepper later, the new version of Viper’s Video Quicktags has been released!

It’s a complete recode literally from scratch (essentially no old code was used) and is incredibly more powerful and feature filled than before.

The only way to really see all the new features is to try it yourself, but here’s a taste of it:

A client needed a way to regenerate all thumbnails for their uploads, so I threw together a plugin to do that in just one click and a helpful interface.

Another teaser of Viper’s Video Quicktags v6.0.0:

Remember, it’s still not too late to get those feature suggestions in!

I’m in the process on recoding Viper’s Video Quicktags and am looking for input.

If there’s a feature or a video site that you would like to see supported in the next version, the comments section of this post is the place to post it. Please note that in order for a video website to be supported, the URL in your address bar must have something in common with the embed code. What I mean is the URL can’t be this:

http://videosite.com/videos/my-cool-video/

while the embed HTML looks like this:

<object width="400" height="300"><param name="movie" value="http://embed.videosite.com/files/52asdf7f43j753v32465” /></object>

Notice that there is no way for my plugin to figure out the embed ID from the video’s URL.

Perhaps in a future version I’ll add the ability for you to paste in the HTML embed code and the Javascript powered button will figure out the video ID before inserting it into the post (just inserting the HTML itself into the post would defeat the purpose of this plugin), but not for now.

Oh, and here’s a sneak preview of my work in progress configuration screen:

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes your [gallery]’s use Lightbox to show the fullsize images. Users can now browse the fullsize images without leaving the page.

It was written after a I got a request by Wendy© for such a thing on my Direct Image URLs For Galleries plugin which itself was the starting point for this new plugin.

Here’s a demo:

Images by Microsoft