I never saw this, how awesome! Especially awesome since I’m an avid Chrome user now
YouTube’s HTML5 Video Player
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)
Gmail unsubscribe
Gmail now has a feature where when you mark a message as SPAM, it offers to automatically unsubscribe you from the e-mail. I guess they parse the e-mail for links found shortly after the word “unsubscribe” or perhaps something a bit more sophisticated. Neat. I wrote about unsubscribing before, but what I did was way more manual.