Using the HTML5 version of YouTube with Arch Linux

Last week Firefox began blocking the Flash plugin due to a vulnerability.  Upon visiting YouTube I was greeted with the following error.

flash-vulnerability

At this point I decided to try out the HTML5 version of YouTube.  I had looked into it when it first debuted but ultimately decided to stick with the Flash version.

After uninstalling Flash, I proceeded to check my HTML5 compatibility.  HTMLVideoElement and WebPM VP8.  I should be good to go.

html5-compatability

Unfortunately, I was only able to view videos at 360p quality.  You will also notice that I did not have H.264 support despite having the OpenH264 plugin installed.  Thanks to the #archlinux irc channel I discovered that I needed to install gst-libav and gst-plugins-good.  This gave me H.264 support.

h264-compatability

This provided me with access 720p quality videos.  YouTube defaulted to 720p unless the video was 480p or below.  Then it provided me with the 360p version.  While I knew that HTML5 did not support 1080p quality videos, the lack of 480p was disconcerting.  I attempted to turn on MSE support but saw no effect.

mse-compatability

Following the same article’s instructions, I turned on MSE for H.264.  While giving me selections for all quality settings, including 1080p, this completely broke YouTube and I could not play any videos.  I quickly removed the setting from the about:config.

My next issue was that the HTML5 player required a cookie to be set.  Otherwise I would receive the Flash player and my browser would notify me that I was missing a plugin.  Some quick searching revealed that adding &html5=1 to any YouTube link would cause it to provide the HTML5 player with no cookie set.  I found an extension that did this automatically and I was able to resume my normal viewing of YouTube.

Ultimately, the Arch Linux repositories were quickly updated with a patched version of the flash plugin.  I have decided that I am not quite ready to switch to the HTML5 version of YouTube.  Therefore I have updated my plugin and removed the extension to default YouTube to HTML5.

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