Is there a way to force HD YouTube videos from the start?

Educators
1

I’ve just recently noticed that the Open edX video player doesn’t have the default youtube controls to specify the quality level of videos. I have videos all the way up to 4K, but I’m noticing that when videos are first started, they always start as SD, and only transition to HD after a little bit. I have gigabit internet so I’m pretty sure the issue is not my network connection. The issue seems to be the defaults of the Open edX player, and the inability to select a quality before starting, the way you can in the normal youtube video player. Given that I’m showing screen recordings are high resolution, this tends to make the screen look very bad, and leads to a suboptimal learning experience.

Is there any way to override this to force a video to start at HD quality (1080p or above)?

It seems like the Open edX player also strips off the video quality suggestion from URLs like the ones specified here? Is there a way to link someone to a YouTube Video in HD 1080p quality? - Stack Overflow Is there any way to override that?

2 Likes
2

I’m having the same problem. My YouTube videos are in HD 1080p but showing as much lower quality in edX. Is there a solution or workaround for this?

1 Like
3

Refreshing this since I still notice it happening.

4

I noticed this today too, so I wouldn’t mind a solution too. Also it seems like if the youtube thumbnail gets cached as poor quality, it remains poor quality even if I delete a video and create a new video element for it (as I’m forced to do to update subtitles…)

1 Like
5

Bumping this since there’s still no solution. This is leading to a bunch of students just clicking through to watch inside YT instead of in open edx

6

We are still experiencing issues with this? Has anyone found a solution in the last year? Our videos look find on 1920x1080 monitors, but are sometimes unreadable on higher resolution.

7

I am definitely seeing this still as well. (I was just searching the forums for something about this, but found this thread.) For some reason some videos just refuse to play in 1080p HD mode to start with, so some small text is illegible, until someone clicks through to YouTube. I had a student say they had 1 gigabit ethernet at home and even they see this :frowning: