[synopeas]

You can't just change the number. There are other bits that are different as well.

Just change the quality in the player and wait for it to start playing. As soon as it does you can change it straight back to low quality. The link you want should be the one at the bottom of the list.

It may be possible to stop the YouTube player altogether and just use vlc to watch the stream from the file as it's downloading. I think that should work. That way you would be using all your bandwidth to download and still be able to watch it more or less as it's happening.