For some time now Youtube has no longer used Flash to stream its videos but the new HTML5 technology, which is lighter and does not require external plugins for playback. This step has certainly improved the streaming quality of the videos and, above all, made the Youtube site more stable and safer which, at times, went into block due to the terrible bugs of the Adobe Flash plugin.
On older and less powerful PCs, however, there may still be problems in viewing youtubue videos which can be very slow to load or create some increase in CPU usage with HD videos which slows down computer performance and drain more battery than needed on laptops.
For these reasons, those who are not satisfied with how Youtube is viewed on their computer, if slow or if it occupies too many computer resources, instead of lowering the quality of the videos manually, can install a special extension called h264ify, available for both Chrome and Firefox .
The h264ify extension is intended to improve YouTube on weaker computers, moving from VP8 / VP9 video encoding to H.264 encoding.
According to the author of the extension, the default video format of Youtube, VP8 / VP9, uses only the computer processor to show the video while H.264 instead also takes advantage of the hardware acceleration of the video card, going to lighten the load on the CPU.
Put simply, the video becomes smoother and if it was slow before, with this extension installed and active, it should load faster without any loss of quality.
The GPU (i.e. the video card) is used to load the video thus lightening the CPU work.
The extension works immediately after installation and there is nothing to configure.
To verify that it is working, you need to open a Youtube video, press on it with the right mouse button and open the "statistics for nerds".
From the statistics box, check if Video / MP4 indicating H.264 encoding is written on the Mime Type line and not video / WebM indicating VP8 / VP9 encoding.
The h264ify extension also has an option in its Options menu that allows you to limit the quality of videos always to 60fps, which is useful on old and underpowered PCs.
Although there is no guarantee that this extension will work, in my case, on a mid-level computer, it has still improved the viewing and uploading of videos to Youtube when I set the HD resolution to 1080p .
From the statistics for Nerd you can check if there are differences in the display of the video with and without the h264ify extension, looking at the line where Dropped Frames is written, which are less and better.
READ ALSO: Youtube video without interruption accelerating buffering (loading)
