It is always annoying to see your CPU usage piking and  laptop fans going all bonkers when you play any YouTube video in Flash for a prolonged period of time. Yes, we all know about YouTube’s HTML5 Trial, but it simply does not play all the videos in HTML5 with you still having to rely on Flash for a lot of older videos.

Those days are luckily over. We have at our hands, a divine extension for Google Chrome  that not only plays every single video in YouTube in HTML5 format but also lets you download the video in a single click.

HTML5 Video for YouTube

The extension swaps YouTube’s default Flash/HTML5 player with its own replacement, which is frankly speaking, slightly lacking compared to YouTube’s native player. But there are a couple of key positives here : The ability to select between MP4 and WebM HTML5 formats (when available) and the option to download the video in a click.

Download: HTML5 Video for Google Chrome

Customisation

The extension also offers a decent degree of customization  You can choose the preferred codec as well as the resolution apart from being able to customize the player to your needs.

Performance

Chrome has very good hardware accelerated video decode support built into it and it clearly excels at it compared to Firefox at this stage. With this extension enabled, long bouts of 1080p video playback did not make my CPU utilization go anywhere above 5 10% which would be otherwise impossible if it were Flash.  And as expected, every time videos were played in HTML5. No more Flash!

Quirks

The only quirk of the extension apart from the player being tad minimalistic is occasional loading of YouTube’s own flash/HTML5 videos in the background along with the  extensions’ HTML5 video. However this can be simply fixed by a quick refresh.

Firefox Fan? We have got you covered

As we covered earlier, Mozilla had pushed support for H264 codec support for HTML5 videos in Firefox 20, though it had to be enabled manually in about:config. Currently though, the feature is only supported on  Windows 7 and above. Mac, Linux and Windows XP,Vista will be coming up in future releases.

Conclusion

These extensions should help keep your CPU consumption at bay when playing YouTube videos without you having to worry about the notorious flash player anymore. Happy Surfing!