A few clever people have come up with some non-Flash alternatives to watching videos on YouTube. Despite being a proprietary format, Flash runs poorly and utilizes much of the CPU on Linux and Mac OS X machines. The reliance of big websites like YouTube on such proprietary software has led to huge inconveniences to people who do not want to run Flash or do not have it installed.

The folks over at Neosmart Technologies have created their YouTube HTML5 Viewer, where you can enter a YouTube video URL, and the website automatically converts it to be playable in a browser that supports HTML5—completely Flash free. For Firefox users, they’ve also written a GreaseMonkey script that creates a link from the YouTube page to the HTML5 alternative.

Mozilla’s own Christopher Blizzard decided to write his own userscript, dubbed Theoratube, that works in sync with the Firefogg extension for Firefox to scrape YouTube videos, convert them to Theora, and stream them back into the browser as quickly as possible. The process isn’t quick, and Blizzard talks about the bugs in his blog post, but at least it’s a non-Flash alternative to enjoying your favorite videos.