Force youtube embed to start in 720p

(This answer was updated, as the previous method using vq isn't recognized anymore.)

Specifying the height of the video will change the quality accordingly. example for html 5;

<iframe style='width:100%; height:800px;' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxxxxxx'></iframe>

If you don't want to hardcode the width and height you can add a class to the iframe for css media queries.

Tested on a working server + passes the w3.org nuhtml validator.

You can do this by adding a parameter &hd=1 to the video URL. That forces the video to start in the highest resolution available for the video. However you cannot specifically set it to 720p, because not every video has that hd ish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID&hd=1

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/player_parameters.html

UPDATE: as of 2014, hd is deprecated https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters?csw=1#Deprecated_Parameters

This is an embed example of video played in HD 1080.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://youtube.com/v/IplDUxTQxsE&vq=hd1080" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="1"></iframe>

Let's break apart the code:http://youtube.com/v/ video_id &vq=hd1080

Video id for that video: IplDUxTQxsE you will see this type of random code in the link of every YouTube video.

So far so good, this trick works for playing full HD videos directly on webpages!

You can change the quality to 720 too. &vq=hd720

I've managed to get this working by the following fix:

//www.youtube.com/embed/_YOUR_VIDEO_CODE_/?vq=hd720

You video should have the hd720 resolution to do so.

I was using the embedding via iframe, BTW. Hope someone will find this helpful.

Youtube doesn't support playback quality anymore