We’ve repeated ad nauseam that YouTube has several aspects to improve, but one that seems completely ignored is performance. Some users with computers capable of playing high-definition video can do nothing but curse the air for the poor playback quality that YouTube delivers. While there are multiple factors to diagnose, one of the most critical is the video codec, and the extension H264ify forces Chrome and Firefox to use H.264 instead of VP8/VP9.
YouTube can maintain a true “love-hate” relationship with some users. When it works well, the experience is wonderful, but if lost frames, stuttering playback, buffering issues and the inability to use high-definition modes are the norm, there’s not much to appreciate about the service. Unfortunately, both YouTube and web browsers are complex pieces, and often it’s hard to get them to agree. To this we must add hardware acceleration, the condition of drivers, and their compatibility in each build of Firefox and Chrome. When using the HTML5 player, YouTube by design relies on VP9 or VP8 codecs, in an attempt to ensure compatibility. The problem is that decision leads to a loss of performance, since the acceleration levels in VP8/VP9 are more basic, or directly nonexistent on certain systems.
Here is where H264ify comes in. The extension has been available in the Chrome store for a while, but recently it has joined the Firefox ranks, with the same goal: Force YouTube in both browsers to use the H.264 codec instead of VP8 or VP9. If the acceleration functions available on the graphics card (and the computer in general) are more favorable to H.264, the user will experience smoother video playback, without cuts, pauses, or lag between audio and video. The options available in the extension are reduced to two: Enable or disable H.264 mode, and block 60 frames-per-second videos. By offloading more processing onto the video chip, H264ify should (in theory) lead to better multitasking and lower battery consumption, although that’s hard to verify.
Of course, H264ify is not a perfect solution, and it might actually make things worse. The graphics-card-driver-browser-acceleration-video combinations are too broad to expect the extension to work in all cases. Before using H264ify, the user must verify that the hardware acceleration parameters are enabled in each browser, and this goes far beyond checking a box in the advanced options (it requires exploring Firefox’s about:config or Chrome’s chrome://flags). One extra detail to consider is that H264ify does not work on Chromium, because H.264 support is not there. If you use the extension, the only thing YouTube will do is “drop to Flash”, and I think nobody wants that these days, unless it’s the last resort...
