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
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!
This is a remarkable extension especially for Mac and Linux Chrome users where the Flash support is even more tacky.
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.
However if you are on Windows 7 and above and are using Firefox 20+ you can definitely check out this add-on.
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!
