On my machine playing the same videos in mplayer or vlc is very close to the CPU used playing in the browser using the video tag. I did read the article, which

On my machine playing the same videos in mplayer or vlc is very close to the CPU used playing in the browser using the video tag. I did read the article, which continued from the bit I quoted as: As of this writing, browsers that support the video tag are likely to use a tremendous amount of CPU in order to play video. Why? It's likely because they have to deal with the exact same performance penalties that Flash does; specifically, that YUV video data needs to be transformed into RGB data to be plopped in the browser window. The implication was that the video tag will be just as bad as Flash, which just isn't my experience.