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Do you have Perian installed? Does http://www.youtube.com/html5 report that Safari supports WebM? If so, then what you’re seeing is YouTube preferring WebM over h.264, even though h.264 decoding is hardware accelerated rather than the software decoding that Perian’s WebM support provides. You can try temporarily disabling Perian, relaunching Safari, and then watching a video again to see whether the performance is more in line with your expectations.

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Oh dear, that is what it is? That's why HTML5 videos have become all but unusable on Youtube as of late and I have to fallback to Flash, of all things?

Yup. It’s really unfortunate.

I prefer to opt out of YouTube’s HTML5 mode and use the YouTube5 extension to achieve a similar effect. It also has the added benefit of avoiding the Flash player on videos where YouTube chooses not to use the HTML5 player.

Thanks! That seems to be the problem. Perian is so useful, I don’t want to disable it just to use YouTube’s HTML5 player. I guess I will have to stick to Flash. (Or try again with ClickToFlash or something.)

Try the YouTube5 extension for a happy medium between ClickToFlash and Flash.

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