High Quality Youtube

Youtube has recently started providing High(er) quality videos on their site. While not all videos are high quality (the old trick was to trick the encoder not to re-encode your videos). On the good videos, the quality is dramatic. Here’s an example:
All About Halifax (LQ)
All About Halifax (HQ)

I’ve also found a blog entry which outlines some of the more technical side. I’ve also noticed that the higher quality actually loads faster. I think my ISP does some kind of youtube throttling, but I’m not sure.

Here’s some screenies:

EDIT It’s good also to mention that they amped up the sound quality to higher levels, and went to stereo. It’s now at 128kbps and not 96kbps mono. Yay! Also, sorry for the odd artifacts on the photos, I used a tool that apparently draws crap to the window while I resize the box to take a screenshot. Bad KSnapshot, bad!