Over the past few days a number of folks have been noticing a new "watch this video in higher quality" message popping up below selected YouTube videos. Now, "higher quality" does not mean HD. The aspect ratio of these videos remains the same, but if you've got a fast internet connection, clicking this button will display a video encoded at a higher bitrate, which means it will likely look a whole lot sharper.

The eagle-eyed folks at CyberNet noticed there's also a new option in the YouTube account settings that should keep you from ever having to click the "higher quality" button. Just navigate to your account settings, and under the Account heading you should see an section labeled "Video Playback Quality."

In other YouTube-related news, TiVo today announced plans to add a YouTube video section to its set top box software later this year. The software update will be available for TiVo HD and TiVo Series3 units only, which is probably because older TiVo models don't have the hardware to decode H.264 video. Now, if you've ever tried watching YouTube videos on a high definition TV, you know that most videos look like crap when you blow them up on a big screen. So hopefully a larger percentage of YouTube videos will be available in higher quality by the time the TiVo service launches.