Currently, when you watch videos, unless they only have 240p available, which is rare, 360p is the default quality for YouTube videos. Is there a way to change the default so it goes by the highest quality available? For example, if the highest quality is 480p, which it for the majority of videos, have the video automatically play at 480p when loaded without having to manually change it from 360p; if the video can go up to 720p, have it play at 720p; finally, if it can go up to 1080p, have it play at 1080p by default.
The size of the player is 360p. Going bigger than the 360p setting is just a waste of bandwidth, memory, and processing. If I remember correctly though, there is a way to set it to automatically change to a better resolution when you go full screen. And that would actually matter.
Yeah, when going to full screen, it changes. I was just wondering if there's a way when you first load up the video since you don't always watch everything in full screen.
It doesn't matter. The player itself to 360p. If you get it at 1080p your computer will then need to resize down to 360p to display it in the player. All that comes from it is you need to download more, process all the data to resize it down, and then process the downscaled data again to actually display it. And considering your computer will be trying to do this as fast as possible to keep up it will likely do a worse job than the YouTube servers doing it in advance. So you're actually hindering yourself in a way by using the higher resolutions when you don't need it. Though for most downscaling you won't notice the difference.
But if you still really want to after Mixt's explanation, you can try using this Greasemonkey script.
