Experience Smoother YouTube Videos with h264ify Chrome Extension

Incredible! I am a user of chrome for years on Linux, and when I look to a still music video playlist it takes 50% of CPU on a Intel 12th gen in 720P !!! Just for the audio and a still image. I have tried everything, along video accteleration VA API intel. I just installed this extension on chrome, and bam 8% CPU in 720P!

VP9 CPU load 35-60%, GPU load 25-30% H.264 CPU load 8-20%, GPU load 15-20% 5/5 oh, and page load faster

I haven't done any benchmarks with power draw, performance, etc., so I can't attest to how efficient it is yet. However, it definitely moved the video decoding process to my GPU and reduced my CPU usage (20% to 2% @ 1080p60), so I'll give it 5 stars.

works as advertised, chromebook performance greatly improved, thanks

it doesn't do anything

This 100% cured my buffering issues. I am running a somewhat low performance arm based ChromeBook and it could not handle any video over 480p without buffering every 5 seconds, but now I can easily stream full 1080p on YouTube with VERY FEW dropped frames, to the point where you cannot tell. (~1 in 900 frames) this extension is very effective and I highly recommend it.

Does not work. 360p 100% CPU Athlon X2 5200+ The extension probably only works on hardware released no later than 5 years ago. It's a shame that YouTube doesn't use compression that doesn't require much processing power. Any video downloaded to my computer runs perfectly in 1080p in the media player. Why can't this be done in a web browser?

Bring it to Safari please, desperately needed!

thanks, it really help for high cpu usage on youtube

Installed this after a little birdy told me that the ramping up of my CPU when viewing YT on my browser may be caused by the VP Codecs YT uses by default. Low and behold, after installing, no more excessive CPU usage when the player overlay is active and when previewing videos (mini-player).

Installed this after a little birdy told me that the ramping up of my CPU when viewing YT on my browser may be caused by the VP Codecs YT uses by default. Low and behold, after installing, no more excessive CPU usage when the player overlay is active and when previewing videos (mini-player).

YouTube's been lagging my laptop to hell and back recently. Saw this app mentioned in a Reddit thread and decided to give it a try. INSTANT RESULTS. My laptop can actually run other tabs with YouTube open now. The extension is easy to use as well, it's just three checkboxes!

Amazing. Drastically reduces CPU usage

Amazing. Drastically reduces CPU usage

A must have if you have a weak CPU but strong GPU. (it shifts the workload to GPU). You can see this in Task Manager when playing a Youtube video.

Makes old MacBooks excellent YouTube machines again!

Makes the Raspberry Pi 4B actually usable as a super basic desktop. Allows me to watch videos up to 1080p30 without stutter or lag. The HEVC drivers still aren't great so being able to fall back on good ol' h.264 allows this little guy to actually retain some performance.

was having problems with youtube making my computer in 95 degrees by just enabling the extension it dropped to 75 degrees, it works :)

if you use the block 60FPS option youtube will force lower resolutions now as they are no longer converting 1080p 60FPS uploads to 30FPS H264 as they move on with AV1 and WEBM... the block 60FPS mode will drop the resolutions as there is no 30 FPS conversion made above 720p any more if the file is uploaded at 60FPS... H264 4K and 1080P 60 frame rate conversions are not being done on youtubes end any more. turn off block 60FPS and youll get 1080 uploads that were created at 60FPS...

I like this extension a lot. Unfortunately it prevents you from selecting any quality above 1080p. This is fine for my low end hardware but not so good for my other devices. Since chrome extensions are synchronised across devices if you are logged in to the browser I always need to enable/disable the extension depending on the device I'm currently using. It would be better if it doesn't block the higher qualities even if it doesn't work for them... Maybe you could just display a little "h" icon next to the supported qualities instead of blocking the unsupported ones?