Maximizing & Identifying YouTube download audio quality

[chane]

I hope this thread isn't too off-topic for Videolan but:

Audio quality of music is my main concern when downloading from YouTube (and Vimeo, which I only just discovered).

But am I wrong or are there relatively few A/V file viewers? Can you recommend a program that displays an audio or video file’s container (i.e. FLV, MP4, Quicktime, AVI, Matroska, WebM), its audio codec (i.e. AC-3, AAC, ALAC, ALS, FLAC, Vorbis, , TwinVQ, BSAC, MPEG1 thru-4, SLS, Audio Lossless Coding, MPEG-4 DST, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Windows Media Audio, Wavpack) and bit rate (from 60 up to at least 192Kbps)?

Since transcoding (i.e. file converting) is said to produce somewhat lossy results, I don’t require any such viewer software featuring those utilities, other viewer features being equal. Storage space is sufficiently cheap enough for archiving larger HQ or HD files in their original format.

Free or not doesn’t matter, so long as it reliably displays all popular containers
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... er_formats) , the lossy and lossless
audio codecs found in them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_codecs)
and the lowest to the highest bit rates in files found on YouTube, Vimeo and HDTracks.com.

[bat999]

Can you recommend a program that displays an audio or video file’s container (i.e. FLV, MP4, Quicktime, AVI, Matroska, WebM), its audio codec (i.e. AC-3, AAC, ALAC, ALS, FLAC, Vorbis, , TwinVQ, BSAC, MPEG1 thru-4, SLS, Audio Lossless Coding, MPEG-4 DST, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Windows Media Audio, Wavpack) and bit rate (from 60 up to at least 192Kbps)?

Hi
MediaInfo does that job.
From here ---> http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en

[chane]

According to http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3...vs-mp4-quality and
http://www.h3xed.com/web-and-interne...80p-720p-1080p adding “&hd=1” , “&hd=18” and/or “&hd=22” to the end
of a YouTube file’s URL code, will access the HD version of the file (which by default uses a better quality audio codec and/or a higher bit rate), if such a file version was created and uploaded.

But what is a video embedder? How does it differ from the player at YouTube’s and/or Vimeo’s site?

Is there a particular player/embedder that I can download (free or not) which, among other things, can be set to also automatically locate the HD or HQ (> 128kbps and/or lower loss codec) version of the file on the web-even it’s no longer posted at YouTube? If yes, please suggest one.

Is there a way to enable that embedder or player so that it always grabs the HD or HQ file first-and so eliminate the need to add the above suffixes to the URL?

I typically use Firefox. Excuse the possibly dumb question but are all browsers the same or might one somehow provide wider access to these HD or HQ version files? Or are there special HD or video quality browser settings?