Every now and then a user will complain that there are problems when trying to play videos on, let’s say, youtube.com. Now there are many different reasons why a video playback might be problematic, one way or another. But, one thing you can try is changing the player the computer uses to play videos in your web browser.

How, do you ask? Well, before we get to that, let’s make sure we all know what we’re talking about.

You might have heard of “Flash Player”. In a nutshell, Flash player has been the video player that youtube.com and many other video sites use as the default player that can play videos. Do a test, go to your favorite video on youtube and right click on the video with your mouse. It will display several menu options, and the last one might mention Adobe Flash Player (Adobe is the name of the company that currently makes that player).

There is, however. another option that might be available to be used as the player for youtube and other videos: the HTML5 player. If you want to know what HTML5 means, it’s simply the 5th revision of HTML. I have seen, some times, that changing from using the Flash player to the HTML5 player can sometimes improve the playback quality or handle certain problems. So you can try doing that if you’re having troubles with Flash Player. To change it in youtube.com, click on this link: http://www.youtube.com/html5  and then click on the button that says Request the HTML5 player. Once that’s done close the browser and open it again, and then try playing a youtube video.

To confirm you are now indeed using the HTML5 player, right click on the video again, and you should see menu items that mention  the HTML5 player instead of the Adobe Flash Player. If you want to revert, click on the above link again and click on the button that says Use the default player and you should be back to using Flash if that is what your browser was using before.

Hope this helps.