bringing theora to youtube (the hard way)

“I wrote a greasemonkey script called Theoratube that connects
to the Firefogg extension. It’s based very heavily on the
really great Youtube without Flash Auto user script that lets you
embed videos as a plug-in. But in my case I decided to use native
Theora and HTML5 video because it’s more reliable, has
controls and doesn’t require any additional software to start
working.

“How does it work? It pulls down the video, uses Firefogg to
transcode it, and then stuffs it back into the browser via a
private URL. It’s slow because it has to pull + encode the
entire video, but it works surprisingly well for something that is
as hacky as it is.

“The worst part is the delay in between loading it and the first
time you can play the video. It needs a few changes to make it more
usable:”

Complete
Story