Youtube tries out flashless videos with HTML5

Thanks to the new HTML5 Standards you can play videos directly through html with no plugins required. Naturally Youtube has taken advantage of this and has been running a few beta tests on the idea with full html video pages.

You can now sign up to a beta testing area which will run all your videos without the need for a flash plugin which should lead to a much better user experience, less crashes and hopefully all run a little faster.

This is currently only open to Chrome and Safari users but we can’t imagine firefox will be far off. The only limitations are it won’t play full screen and if they have ads, or aren’t available in h.264, you will get the usual Flash player.

Add yourself into the beta here http://youtube.com/html5