YouTube has announced an experimental version of an HTML5 supported player for their videos. Most of them, anyway. It doesn’t support videos with ads, captions or annotations. It also requires that you’re using a browser that supports the <video> tag, and h.264 encoded videos.
So, Safari and Chrome work for this, as does Internet Explorer, as long as ChromeFrame is installed.
To try it out, visit this page and click the link at the bottom that says “Join the HTML5 Beta”, and you’re set. If the video doesn’t have the limitations mentioned earlier, you’ll be watching using the brand spankin’ new HTML5 player.
For the record, in my initial tests on my MacBook Pro, I noticed a significant difference in CPU utilization between the Flash player and the HTML5 player. Apparently Flash has had this issue with Mac’s across the board. I’ll watch a somewhat lengthy YouTube video and notice my fans start spinning up and my laptop heating up. No more, with HTML5. Not to mention, it’s the new standard.
