How to set YouTube to play HTML5 videos instead of Flash Videos

YouTube HTML5 Video Player is an opt-in experiment for HTML5 support on YouTube. If you are using a supported browser, you can choose to use the HTML5 player instead of the Flash player for most videos. Your web-browser should support both the video tag in HTML5 and the h.264 video codec.

Supported Web-Browsers

• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari (version 4+)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer with Google Chrome Frame installed

Additional Restrictions:

• Videos with ads are not supported (they will play in the Flash player)
• If you've opted in to other testtube experiments, you may not get the HTML5 player (Feather is supported, though)

To join the HTML5 experiment, navigate to http://www.youtube.com/html5

See also:
How can I download HTML5 videos from YouTube?

Youtube was using a proprietary h.264 codec. On May the 19th 2010 Google announced that On2 VP8 video codec is now open-source as part of a new “WebM” project. Google, which owns On2 Technologies, released VP8 codec software under a BSD-like license and the VP8 bitstream format specification under an irrevocable free patent license.

Now YouTube videos are being converted to WebM format using VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio codec.

Support of WebM is coming to Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer very soon.


How to Play WebM Video on YouTube

1. Download and install a supported browser.
2. Start the newly installed browser.
3. Go to www.youtube.com/html5 and enroll in the YouTube HTML5 experiment.
4. Search for a video by keyword. For example, trailers.
5. In the browser’s address bar, add &webm=1 to the end of the URL. For example, http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...rs&aq=f&webm=1.
6. Press Enter.
7. In the list of videos that appears, click any of the links.
8. The video will play in your browser and display HTML5 webm in the toolbar of the video player.