I was browsing through YouTube the other day, and was pleasantly surprised by the high definition (720 HD) videos that’s now available. Sure they require much more bandwidth to view in full HD glory, but the quality is outstanding.

Which then got me thinking as to how to embed such high quality videos on my blog or other webiste. Turns out, the process is pretty simple (see my blog post on the Les Grossman dance).

Here’s a quick how to:

1. Find a high definition video on YouTube (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-kXucWIIzk)
2. Find the embed code (in the gray box on the right side of the YouTube page) and insert it into your Wordpress post or web page. It’ll be something like this:
   

   <object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5-kXucWIIzk&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5-kXucWIIzk&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

3. Add &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the URL parts of the embed code. So the code beocmes something like this:
   

   <object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5-kXucWIIzk&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D22“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5-kXucWIIzk&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D22” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

4. And finally, because HD videos have the wider format, you might want to change the embed’s height and width to give it the nicer wide format look:
   

   <object width=”530” height=”310“><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5-kXucWIIzk&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5-kXucWIIzk&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”530” height=”310“></embed></object>

The final result should look like this:

George W. Bush (”Dubya”) has the lowest popularity rating of all modern US Presidents. This video is pretty telling…

And here’s his resume.

For those who live in the US, it’s hard to avoid the Shamwow infomercials. In a weird unexplainable way, I’m drawn to the ad… Vince really knows how to sell stuff. I think he’s even better than the Oxy-clean guy. Anyway, here’s the original commercial.

And here’s a parody of it…

ps: Does it really who? No idea! But that infomercial… Sham WOW!

I saw Tropic Thunder a month or two back. It was pretty funny, but the funniest bit is the Les Grossman dance.

BTW, that’s Tom Cruise playing Les Grossman!

EDIT: here’s the 720p HD version…

If you try to use rm (Linux command) to delete too many files, it will often return the error “Argument list too long”.

To get around that problem, use this instead:

find . -name "*" -print0 | xargs -0 rm


The find command is quite flexible, and can be also used in combination to delete files in a certain date range, of a certain size, and even based on when a file was last modified. Such as this code, which deletes any file modified more than 2 days ago:

find . -mtime + 2 -print0 | xargs -0 rm