This Neat Little Trick Will Enable Full-HD Resolution in the Tesla YouTube App

What’s the use of having a beautiful, big screen if you cannot enjoy full-HD content on it? Many Tesla owners kill time while charging their cars by watching videos or playing games. Nevertheless, recently, the YouTube app was limited to 360p resolution, which makes the videos look horrible on a huge infotainment screen. The limited resolution may have been introduced when YouTube changed the default resolution for Tesla to match the one on mobile devices. At the same time, the inability to change it via app settings might be a bug that would be squashed in a later update.

Nevertheless, Tesla owners cannot change the video resolution even when connected to a WiFi network. In the case of YouTube, using the app or the built-in browser makes no difference, as the resolution settings are not functional either. Tesla owners reported that other streaming services, like Netflix or Disney+, also started displaying video in low quality. This indicates that the change might have been introduced intentionally to limit data usage.

While many considered somehow acceptable the limited resolution on the LTE data plan, others bashed Tesla’s decision not to offer the choice for better video quality when connected to the WiFi. Everyone hopes this is just a bug, especially as other settings on the same page, like captions and speed, are also unresponsive.

Thankfully, Reddit user u/taska9 has found a workaround to this problem by forcing YouTube to run in the browser. For that, you need to use the YouTube embed link followed by the “vq” parameter in the built-in browser. This is useful when you want to set the video’s resolution to a specific value, and it works by forcing the vehicle’s infotainment system to use the desktop version of the website. Then you can adjust the video quality as you wish.

“So far, I have found that if you use the YouTube embed link with the vq parameter, I can get 1080p,” u/taska9 writes. “Say the link is https://youtu.be/nzYrogkhmXI Then you enter this link to the browser, youtube.com/embed/nzYrogkhmXI?vq=hd1080. It works.”

There’s a more elegant solution, though, as the user u/No_Way_2676 discovered. It involves using the left scroll on the steering wheel to change the resolution. For that, you need to bring up the menu with the resolution settings, hold the drop-down box on the touchscreen and, while doing so, rock the left steering wheel button to the left to select a resolution. It sounds complicated, but it sure works, as confirmed by other users.