Watch YouTube Videos Without Flash in HTML5

Last updated by

YouTubeRunning on Mac or Linux and tired of Adobe Flash eating up all your CPU cycles while you’re watching YouTube? Buggy plugins that crash your browser and freeze your PC? Proprietary formats that get in the way? Want to embrace HTML5 and the future? Well, now you can… one YouTube video at a time.

We’ve written an HTML 5 Video Viewer for YouTube, and you can use it to browse YouTube in true 21st Century HTML5 quality. And it’s super-simple to use.

Flash has been the bane of online websurfers ever since the 90s, especially on platforms where Adobe doesn’t bother to go the extra mile to ensure that their proprietary, binary implementations are stable and efficient. On Linux and Mac OS X, the flash implementation takes up over half the available CPU and at high-resolutions stuttering occurs. HTML5 poses the answer providing a way for browsers to use the native implementations to render videos directly in the browser without resorting to ActiveX and 3rd-party browser plugins… it just has yet to be embraced.

But now you can uninstall Flash and enjoy your online videos in peace. Just go to http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/ and enter the URL of a video to watch it in the embedded HTML5 viewer. Yes, you can skip, skim, pause, resume away to your heart’s content.

Even better, we’ve written a GreaseMonkey/UserScript to add a link to all YouTube video pages that points to the HTML5 version, leaving you with no excuse to still use the Flash interface!

All modern browsers that support basic HTML5 are supported. You’ll need to have an MP4 decoder installed on your PC. Happy viewing!

Update:

It’s been brought to our attention that Firefox does not support streaming MP4 content due to licensing restrictions, and as we mention above, an MP4 decoder is a minimum requirement.

  • Similar Posts

    Craving more? Here are some posts a vector similarity search turns up as being relevant or similar from our catalog you might also enjoy.
    1. Updating Flash Player Manually on Chrome for OS X
    2. Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

    • 137 thoughts on “Watch YouTube Videos Without Flash in HTML5”

    2. Works fine for me on Safari/Win, but not Firefox 3.5
      “All modern browsers that support basic HTML5 are supported” ?

    6. Doesn’t work for me. Firefox 3.5.5, Ubuntu 9.04. After pressing the Play button, it changes to a Pause button, but nothong else happens. Moving the slider (which has a blue border, by the way) results only in moving the image (just like dragging any other image on a website)

    7. Doesn’t work in Firefox 3.5 for me. I have no idea how it would? Firefox doesn’t include codecs with licensing fees, and this is just inserting a the Youtube media URL in a video tag.

      Youtube already has their own HTML5 demo site which works like this: http://www.youtube.com/html5 And, of course, also doesn’t work in Firefox 3.5.

    8. Sorry, I was mistaken and this does not work on Firefox. I was under the impression that it had run for me, but I guess that’s the effect an all-nighter can have.

    9. Doesn’t work for me on Ubuntu 8.04 with FF 3.5.6pre (from the ubuntu-mozilla-daily repository on Launchpad). I guess this build doesn’t include some codec-related black magic.

      Kudos for the effort anyway. Hopefully one day the googleboys will do something similar.

    10. Wouldn’t it be better if you just replaced the player inline with your html5 version instead of requiring the user to navigate to another page?

    11. This is idiotic. The only browser that can do only h.264 out of the box is Safari. Chrome, Firefox, Opera all can do Theora. Safari can be upgraded using the Xiph QT components.

      So in the end, an element would be better here.

    12. Firefox and Opera will not be support MP4 to my knowledge. Safari will not support OGG to my knowledge. Chrome, Firefox, and Opera will all support the previously proposed Ogg Theora format.

    13. Unfortunately I can’t get the video to actually play on FF3.5.5 on OS X 10.6.1. Just the video player with blank content. It works on Chrome on OS X.

      I would very much like it to replace the video player inline, but I haven’t tried the greasemonkey script because the web version didn’t work for me.

      Do I need to do anything special to make it work?

    14. Guys, the solution is simple — install Windows. Why would you pay $1500+ for hardware that can’t even view YouTube? Are you doing it to thumb your nose at everyone to be the cool kid on the block?

    15. Yeah, youtube uses formats (H.264 and .flv files) that are heavily encumbered by patents and the ability to decode them requires licenses from various private companies. We at Mozilla support open formats – youtube does not.

      Totally separate from Mozilla, though, I did a hack to bring html5 and theora to youtube:

      http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=1518

      Not pretty but it works OK.

    17. @bill gates

      you’re a freggin idiot. The flash code base is a HACK. Even adobe admitted it. It’s’ not that the hardware can’t support it, it’s that the code is $hit and they can’t port it.

    20. This isn’t working for me either, I don’t get how the dev’s do all this and promote it and I guess it works for them but not for us, I’m confused!
      One great upside of this though is that you can download Youtube videos really easily and at a great res’, just click on the mp4 link in the HTML5 page!
      Which makes me wonder, is it possible to make this work for downloading BBC video?

    22. Awesome! This saves lots of cpu cycles on my macbook and makes it run much cooler than when viewing the same videos with flash. I hope this will soon replace the youtube flash-based video player. Thanks a lot!

    23. Actually, Adobe Flash technology is not the problem, bad coders are the problem that causes “cpu cycles to be wasted”. I can’t imagine all programs written in HTML 5 will be perfect and bug free, and in the end they are all trying to render video while giving viewers neat options like starting the video stream from any spot on the timeline, caching while protecting IP rights of the owners, blocking specific IP’s etc.

      Just because you, the author, seem to have an irrational hatred for technology you clearly do not understand does not mean there is anything inherently wrong with the technology itself. I agree, many flash programs I have seen have been memory hogs or poorly written, but I can say the same about a lot of PHP scripts, Java programs, C++ programs…etc. Blaming Adobe Flash for your problems is like blaming digital cameras for bad movie plots, or telephony for an annoying phone conversation.

      I agree having choice is good though, and being able to view videos with a choice of technologies will only improve the various players incentives to produce better software.

    25. Youtube, owned by Google, uses propietary Flash.
      Google Chrome, made by Google, has support for HTML5, with .mp4

      Google could wipe Firefox off the browser-market by switching to HTML5 + .mp4 overnight.

    27. code handyman, my friend, I agree. But not for videos. In videos, the only “code” that is involved is the proprietary code that Adobe wrote. All the site owner does is upload a video file in FLV format and tell Flash to play it. And it’s Adobe’s crap code that’s wasting the cycles… code which is the flash core.

    28. Mahmoud, the code involved in Youtube video playback is actually a lot more sophisticated than people realize, and if you took all that code that does things like update the playhead position, stores and plays back streams from randomly accessible locations, allows for “annotations” and dynamic control over advertising that helps monitize the site, all this will provide opportunity for “cpu cycles” to be utilized. This would be the case with HTML 5, Java, or any other technology used to render video. Flash video played as a simple download is pretty much never seen anywhere so its hard for the un-informed to realize the technology used to render our free videos is very complex and utterly taken for granted.

      Again, its not the core technology that is the problem. Flash uses standard, widely available codecs to render simple video. The problem is all the bells and whistles people demand without appreciating the cost of those features in terms of CPU.

      I would be very surprised if HTML 5 was actually able to present all the features that Youtube video player provides without significantly eating “cpu cycles”, and even if it did outperform Adobe flash, better players written in future versions of flash will no doubt outperform that at some point.

    29. If it doesn’t run in Firefox, I won’t use it.

      More reason to use open video formats (hello, YouTube). However, is there an alternative for Firefox. What’s the licensing problem?

    30. Can you provide a cite to a study or some data confirming your claim of “adobe’s crap code” being the source of the problem you claim so confidently in your article? If not, its pretty obvious your argument is based on your emotions, and not in the realm of reality. It would also be interesting to see how your personal coding skills are superior to those of the engineers at Adobe and Macromedia, as well as Youtube, that puts you in a position to make such a sweeping judgement.

    31. Holy crap this works great! Flash = 90+% CPU use, HTML5 = 16% (Mac OS X 10.6 + Safari)

      A question from a non-expert: how me make script go?

      Thanks!

    32. Nice idea, but it doesn’t work with Iron Browser (spyware free version of Chrome). It says you need an HTML5 compliant browser, but Iron is!

    33. @code handyman:

      A simple google search would glean many results of angry users claiming that flash slows down Vista, XP, MacOSX and Linux to a crawl.

      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&hs=qLc&q=flash+is+slow&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

      The reason for this is complicated, basically they ‘forgot’ to enable most of the accelerated paths for rendering. The code is so terrible (might be Macromedia’s legacy) that it’s full of memory leaks too. The trouble is, adobe don’t give a damn:

      http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/why-do-adobe-flash-videos-slow-down/

      I did a two minute google search for this, don’t you think you could have done it yourself before you shoved you shoved your foot in it? You accuse others of ‘sweeping judgements’ but you’re guilty of it yourself. Have a nice day.

    34. code handyman:

      All I can say is that the proof is in the pudding. It’s increasingly rare for me to view videos in youtube in a web browser. Both my HTPC and my netbook are too slow to effectively keep up when flash is running. The web browser sputters and freezes, the CPU gets excessively hot, and frames get dropped everywhere.

      Grab the flv/mp4 video source for any given youtube video, and play them in any normal video playing appliation however… and everything’s GREAT. Smooth playback of HD content, full screen or windowed, without bogging down the rest of the system.

      I cannot WAIT for this stuff to work well.

      Firefox getting streamer support (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540 ) down the road also means that any video format my Linux system can play will work with HTML5 video tags.

      HTML5 has all sorts of support for skipping around, and of course since the UI for it is all done in javascript, you can do annotations and advertising tricks just fine.

      It’s WIN-WIN for everybody involved, as long as Youtube catches up and supports HTML5 video on all their content…

    35. Where do I find a mp4 decoder to work with Firefox? I can’t believe you tell us we need one, but then forget to mention how to obtain said item.

    36. I ran the player in the article and found it used no more or less CPU cycles in Google Chrome on Vista than playing the flash video version. I did find the HTML 5 player did not update the download amount, playback head position did not update, I could not seek to a specific point in the video, the total time/elapsed time did not display, annotations did not come up, and and the play/pause buttons did not function properly. The flash video player in Youtube worked perfectly, and rendered while all the hundreds of other graphics showing other videos and scripts were loading simultaneously on the page.

      That said, I do not have a problem with HTML 5, I think its great if it can provide better performance for computers that struggle with flash.. Just because HTML 5 works for some people does not mean “adobe is crap”, is my point. Adobe flash works fine for 90% of the internet population who use it every day, myself included.

      @Shebang citing references is the onus of the author of the article, once cited, the author can then be properly debated. I am right to demand cites of sweeping statements. I have made no such statement, I merely questioned the validity of the claims of the author. Questioning a claim and attempting to be skeptical are healthy ingredients in dialogue.

      @jeremy: “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. I’m glad the videos work better for you on your HTPC notebook. I have a sony vaio “p” tiny computer running vista and youtube videos run fine for me on that machine, as well as my Acer Aspire notebook. I have edited and uploaded videos on both netbooks, and done countless hundreds of hours of programming in flash on it as well, and have found no performance difference between playing flash and the other video rendering technologies personally.

    37. also, in the articles cited by Shaman, the problem appears to be almost entirely Mac based, and I do not use macs much so I can’t attest to the performance issues on that platform. If this is the case, and the author of this article had qualified his statements with “on the mac”, then I couldnt really argue from personal experience other than I have heard of Adobe mostly giving up on the Mac platform for years now (which I agree seems dumb)

    38. Nice concept. Got it to work with safari 4, but not chrome, firefox, or opera (obviously). Flash usage in safari and firefox appears to usually be about 37-37%, and this was more like 15-17%. Hopefully implementing the controls (full screen, HD, volume toggling) won’t make up that extra 20% 🙂

    40. Hi… Great viewer..sound is clearer than the flash viewer …but I couldn’t blow it up to Full screen size with Google’s Chrome Browser. Any suggestions ?

    41. Oh..One other point. I tried your HTML 5 viewer on IE 8 and it doesn’t work. I’m guessing
      Microsoft IE 8 can’t accept any HTML5 yet
      Bill

    42. “You’ll need to have an MP4 decoder installed on your PC.” I see. You need a Proprietary codec for it to work…

    45. @Atika16384: I’ll definitely add a feature to view by video ID.

      @Code Handyman: The fact that the same code that the webmaster wrote for Windows where it does not take much CPU kills the computer on Linux and Mac and the only difference between them is the proprietary blobs that Adobe makes available should be proof enough.

    46. It does NOT work with Firefox 3.5, Chrome and Chromium on ubuntu 9.04… in what “major” browser does it work under linux?!

    48. Flash still doesn’t work in 64-bit Windows browsers. After two long and lazy years. Any alternative, no matter how many of you want to snarl and sneer, is totally welcome in my book.

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *