YouTube has started testing higher quality videos, all videos are not yet available in higher resolutions but should in the upcoming days, to try things out you need to append a special parameter to the existing video URL, appending &fmt=6 to the URL delivers a 448x336 resolution version of the video and appending &fmt=18 delivers a even better 480x360 resolution version, do keep in mind that higher quality videos need a lot of bandwidth and are not yet available for all the videos.

YouTube deletes videos for different reasons and if a video gets deleted you will see the message "We’re sorry, this video is no longer available", however even after the video unavailable for public viewing, the video might still be on YouTube servers and can be watched using specialized websites as listed below.

Speedbit - the makers of popular software "Download Accelerator Plus (DAP)" have came up with an interesting free software to speedup video loading of 60+ popular video websites like YouTube & MetaCafe, The new offering named SpeedBit Video Accelerator makes your videos stream faster and play smoother by reducing buffering problems and video interruptions or "hiccups".

The software assigns a proxy to your web browser and all connections to the video are routed through SpeedBit servers, utilizing multiple connections resulting in videos without breaks and pauses.