Propably there's already discussion about this but I did not find it. So my question is: how come HD quality doesn't work with N900? There's no possibility to choose the quality. It should not be hardware restriction, since even iphone can play HD clips.

Must be really cool to watch an "HD" clip on a 480x320 screen (iPhone)... pointless.

Have you ever even actually seen the difference? Because it's pretty much same as in browser, even with iphone's crappy resolution.

so yea back to the topic

how do you view HD videos on youtube?

Try using chromium.

Otherwise HD makes a noticeable difference on both the n900 and the n1.

Have you tried adding "&fmt=22" to the end of the video URL?

what about lag? 1080p lags a little on my laptop. (On windows it works smoothly with GPU acceleration.)

I once started the similar topic, it's not just youtube videos but its browser as well which suffers banding when rendered in n900. It's here

Adds the 720p option, but when I start video it only shows the loading circle and the phone lags.

There's one program called Hide User Agent. Using it you can get the same options as you can get while browsing via laptop/desktop, i.e if video supports you get to choose 320p, 480p, 720p or 1080p but the thing is it's unwatchable in n900 even when I tried 480p and overclocked to 850MHz but maybe my connection was too slow that time but I haven't tried since coz I was having other issues like OVI site not recognizing the browser and pages openin in mobile version..