If you are a Youtube addict like myself, then you must have noticed that some videos start playing in the HTML5 video format on their own. This happens even if you have opted out of the HTML5 video experiment in your Youtube account. This is very annoying because the HTML 5 videos do not play that smoothly on my computer. If you want to force Firefox to play all videos on Youtube in the Adobe Flash plugin only, then you can do so by making a few simple changes in the Firefox configuration. Here is how :
- Type about:config in the Firefox browser’s location bar.
- Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise! button to continue.
- You would see a big list of Firefox configuration entries. Type media in the Search field to narrow down the list only to media related configuration entries. You would be able to find four values : media.ogg.enabled, media.wave.enabled, media.webm.enabled, media.windows-media-foundation.enabled.
- Double-click on all these configuration entries to change their value to false. This would make Firefox report to Youtube (actually to all sites) that it cannot play HTML5 videos, forcing it to fallback to the Adobe Flash format of videos. Now if you open any video in Youtube, they would play only using the Adobe Flash plugin.
- If you do not notice the changes in Youtube, then you may try restarting the web browser or clearing out your browser cache.
The steps discussed above were tested successfully on latest version 23 of Firefox browser. Please note that this method not only disables the HTML5 video support from Youtube but also from all the sites that you access using Firefox. If you want to enable HTML5 video support for all websites again, then just follows the same steps – this time switching the values to true.