Could you speed that up a little?

October 28, 2013 12:06 PM

I would like to ask a particular YouTube lecture video creator to enable their videos to play back in HTML5, so I can use the variable speed toggle. Currently, all the videos in this channel are flash only. I'd like to include specific instructions in my email, so that if he wants to do this, he doesn't have to go hunting to find out how. But all the instructions I can find are on how a viewer can view videos that already have HTML5 enabled, not how to enable it in the first place. How can one change previously published flash videos on YouTube so they will play back in HTML5?
posted by ocherdraco to Technology (4 answers total)

Do the videos contain ads? That might be a reason that they won't play back in HTML5.
posted by Ms. Next at 12:21 PM on October 28, 2013

Apologies if this is something you already know, but this was the first I heard about this and now I am fascinated. Are you sure this isn't something you can fix on your end? Even if users are enforcing flash-only versions of the video I think everything has an HTML5 version available, or am I wrong on that? Have you tried switching your user agent (scoot to bottom for specifics) or use another sort of script to see if you get an HTML5 version of the video served to you?
posted by jessamyn at 12:25 PM on October 28, 2013

I just tried an experiment with some of the info from jessamyn's post. I have some old, old videos on YouTube, uploaded before html5, and indeed, they show up as Flash in everything I tried them on, except for Safari on iPad. Spoofing my computer's browser as iPad shows the mobile version, which doesn't have the speed toggle that I could see. Then I signed up for the YouTube html5 trial and they're now playing as html5 with the toggle. But it doesn't work on embeds, just the YouTube site. In any event, it doesn't seem dependent on having the original creator do anything, except possibly deal with ads differently.
posted by sageleaf at 1:33 PM on October 28, 2013

Woohoo! The script in jessamyn's comment did what I needed, so I don't have to get in touch with the content provider. Thanks, jessamyn!
posted by ocherdraco at 6:13 PM on October 28, 2013