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:

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)