Not sure how widespread news this is, but YouTube can be configured to play all videos using t he HTML5 Video support in your browser. All you need to do is go here and click on the join HTML5 trial button.
When you enable this, you’ll notice a few new features in your video playback controls. One of the m ore interesting ones is the ability to accelerate or decelerate video playback. Why don’t you watch this video at 2x speed:
Also, the notes are interesting as I’ve reproduced them here:
Supported Browsers
We support browsers that support both the video tag in HTML5 and either the h.264 video codec or the WebM format (with VP8 codec). These include:
- Firefox 4 (WebM, Beta available here)
- Google Chrome (h.264 supported now, WebM enabled version available via Early Release Channel)
- Opera 10.6+ (WebM, Available here)
- Apple Safari (h.264, version 4+)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (h.264, Beta available here)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 with Google Chrome Frame installed (Get Google Chrome Frame)
Notes
- Fullscreen support is partially implemented. Pressing the fullscreen button will expand the player to fill your browser. If your browser supports a fullscreen option, you can then use that to truly fill the screen
- The HTML5 player has a badge in the control bar. If you don’t see the “HTML5” icon in the control bar, you’ve been directed to the Flash player (due to restrictions listed below)
- The HTML5 player also has a badge to indicate the video is using the WebM format. If you don’t see the “WebM” icon, the video is encoded using h.264
- If you want to find videos with WebM formats available, you can use the Advanced Search options to look for them (or just add &webm=1 to any search URL)
Additional Restrictions (we are working on these!)
- Videos with ads are not supported (they will play in the Flash player)
- On Firefox and Opera, only videos with WebM transcodes will play in HTML5
- If you’ve opted in to other testtube experiments, you may not get the HTML5 player (Feather is supported, though)