No matter how committed you are to some of the alternatives, Google’s YouTube will remain part of your online life. So we continue our look at how to make it more livable.

Readers wrote in with some tips and impressions of YouTube’s new "higher-quality video" mode:

Make Your YouTube More Livable: I Have a Fast Connection Setting

Richard Lainhart, a regular on Create Digital Music (attention, Buchla modular fans!), had some specific tips on which upload settings to use and how to force high-quality playback:

We really prefer Vimeo.com around here, but that doesn’t stop people from uploading video to YouTube — meaning you have to live with the results.

You can make YouTube slightly less painful, however. Old news — the setting popped up a few weeks ago — but if you’re like me and haven’t changed your settings yet, now’s the time. Here’s how:

You’ll need to be logged in. Go to Account > Account (the header on your My Account Page) > Video Playback Quality and choose “I have a fast connection.” You don’t need a terribly fast connection, because the upshot of all of this is that you bump up to 480×360. (Yeah, I know — be still my beating heart. Vimeo, Blip, and others already have HD, and YouTube has 480×360.)

Oh, and it gets worse: not all videos have been converted to the new format.

And worse still: the content uploader apparently has no control over this whatsoever.

Did I mention how much I hate YouTube? Still, it’s worth the 30 seconds it takes to change the setting.

For more discussion:

Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos [Wired.com How-to Wiki]

Videohelp Forum Thread

Anyone with uploading tips for taking advantage of this, or how we can lobby Google to give us something that doesn’t suck — just let us know.

Pinnacle’s new Video Transfer box is a portable analog video (S-video/Y-c and composite) and stereo audio (RCA) h.264 encoder. The Video Transfer box has no built in storage - you supply it. Touting iPod video compatibility and USB Mass storage support, you can in theory hook up any USB 2.0 device to record video to.

With selectable quality (Good, Better, Best - sound familiar?), the Video Transfer supports iPod Video, Nano (third gen) and iPod Classic, as well as the PSP and PSP Slim, USB 2.0 flash drives and USB 2.0 hard drives. I’m guessing no Touch/iPhone support due to the lack of USB Disk Mode. ‘Tis a shame. Ed.: That likely knocks out Zune and a few other devices, as well — if you’re listening, oh device manufacturers, we really, really, really prefer to buy devices with this feature!

Grab a nice big, cheap, old USB 2.0 and route S-Video off of the back of your Edirol V4 mixer and have instant hour-long, high-quality web and PMP ready gig recordings. Sounds perfect.

The best news? It’s coming January 15th for only US$129.99. Awesome.

Via Engadget, and Macworld.com.

Now, what to do about the other end? How about a 500GB - 1TB LaCie external hard drive with composite / S-Video / component video output? You’ll never need a DVD player hooked up to your mixer again.

LaCie’s LaCinema Premier external HDD surfaces [Engadget]

Live visualism needs a format that a) isn’t so huge it eats your hard drive, b) can be decoded and processed by your computer without bringing your CPU to its needs (DV compression causes some issues here), and c) still looks good, especially when scratched. We’ve had a great discussion going on the forums, in case you missed it:

Favorite Video Standards

Here’s the basic consensus:

1. Codec: Motion JPEG (for interlaced footage) or Photo JPEG.
2. Compression ratio/quality: Quality 80 is a decent baseline for JPEG, though you can crank as high as 97 to improve quality.
3. Keyframes: Encode a keyframe on every frame so it’s “scratch-ready”.
4. Alpha channels: For video containing alpha channels, PNG is the format of choice. (See comments.)

Now, I have successfully mixed two DV streams at full resolution; modern machines can handle the decoding. But, of course, this stuff is far more practical for use in terms of efficiency and size.

Next up: tips for improving performance in live video streams. I’ve got some new hardware and software I’ll be working with, and will share what I learn. In the meantime, any nominations (or questions) in that regard?