How to deal with poor HTML5 video performance in Chrome?

Question

Over a year ago we added an video page on our site. At the time OGV wasn't very good, and there was no good WebM encoders available, so we decided to use HTML5 and h.264 for webkit browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) and then fallback to Flash for other browsers (using the same h.264 source file.)

This has been working great for a while. Recently (month or two maybe, so over multiple Chrome versions - currently Version 24.0.1312.52 m) we discovered Chrome really lagging on the playback. We thought it was a server issue, so we upgraded the server, and it is still behaving the same. I remembered reading that Google wanted to drop h.264 and move everyone to WebM, and thought this performance was part of that. We converted some videos to WebM and tested them with Chrome and they lag just as bad. Same video (WebM) streams beautifully in FireFox, and the MP4 streams great in FireFox via the Flash plug in.

I went to YouTube and turned on the HTML5 video support, and found the videos to lag in Chrome too (when running at HD) while they play fine in Flash mode. (Even when HTML5 is enabled, some videos still play via Flash.)

Tested on both Windows 8 and Mountain Lion.

I've talked to co-workers and they are seeing the same issues. So it isn't just me. So my question is:

1. Is this an issue with our video encoding?
2. Is it a bug with Chrome?
3. Or is it just localized to us?
4. Is there a way to deal with this besides switching back to Flash?

Answer 1

This is the flag I mean. If the flag is disabled, the browser tries to use hw-accelerated video decoding, which I can grant provokes wrong and slow video renderization in some devices. If enabled, hw-accelerated video decode is never used, but the above mentioned problems disappear. It theorically increases decoding time in devices actually able to use such acceleration, but I've been working around this field for almost a year and I still didn't realize any difference in that matter. Still didn't get to know how to identify if a device will behave properly (the availability of this feature doesn't seem to grant its proper behavior) with such acceleration without testing, though.