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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

I was bored last night and browsing YouTube in bed on my MacBook, and as usual, when I reached an HD video the fans kicked in and the laptop got hot. Since YouTube now stores the .mp4 version of (most) videos on their servers, I figured it was inevitable that someone had coded something or the other to take advantage of it and view them in streaming format via HTML5 video containers.

When I didn't find one I wrote this instead. It's really basic, but it gets the job done. Give it a YouTube link and it'll display the HTML5 video. The userscript adds a link to the HTML5 viewer for all video pages on YouTube.

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May I suggest a GreaseMonkey script that replaces the youtube-flash with the HTML5 video, inline? Like the Safari-plugin mentioned above, but for Firefox.

If possible please make it use no proprietary GreaseMonkey stuff so Opera users can use it as userscript. :)

edit: Hey, there is http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/youtube5.user.js

This doesn't do the replace inline, it just makes a link to the neosmart website which is quite slow at the moment.

Except that it's totally infeasible to hack h264 support into Firefox -- they link directly with liboggplay instead of a more wholesome API (portable like ffmpeg's, or native like QT/DirectShow/GStreamer) precisely to keep you from doing so without a ton of pain.

They pull ideological bullshit like this all the time (not treating iso8859-1 as cp1252, refusing to do font-face for years, etc). I hope their heads fall off.

It looks really nice. I'm giving it a try right now and it doesn't seem to be downloading the video though. I'm using the latest version of Safari on Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

I tried Firefox too and still no download. Activity Monitor shows no network activity that would be indicative of it downloading. I tried pressing play to get it started, still nothing.

The video that I was attempting to watch:

http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww....

Seems YouTube's changing the token :S

I'm looking into it.

EDIT: Found the problem. Need a couple of minutes though.

EDIT2: Should be working now. Local testing hadn't shown the IP restrictions in the YouTube link token, fixed now. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Nathan.

Yes that got it! Thanks for the quick fix.

I'm not having any luck loading your page, so maybe it's explained there, but how do you get to the .mp4 version of a file? pwnyoutube often works, but it's also often down. I'd love to just be able to download the video and watch it locally, if the .mp4 link allows that.

   javascript:(function(){url='http://deturl.com/download-video.js';document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')).src=url;})();

I've never had a problem using this.

sexy!

I wrote a quick PHP script that loads the YouTube page and parses the URI, creating a download link from the MP4 link template and various info available in the javascript of that page.