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.<p>I did read the article, which continued from the bit I quoted as:<p><i>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.</i><p>The implication was that the video tag will be just as bad as Flash, which just isn't my experience.