monline

Adobe's Flash Player can eat up quite some CPU power and sometimes the sole reason for the Flash plugin's high CPU usage is badly written embed code. Eg. the wmode=transparent embed parameter is only required if the Flash contains (and uses) transparent sections and it is necessary for correct rendering to utilize transparency. The other performance killer is the quality embed parameter: setting it to best is most of the time an overkill and totally unnecessary. Unfortunately some Flash developers (and website maintainers) lack the knowledge/time/desire to tune their embed code for optimal performance and use these parameters even if they are not needed. Flash Performance Optimizer tries to fix these problems to give you a better user experience.

YouTube captions are downloaded by the video player in a custom XML format (it's actually the same format that Google Video used to have). There's a Java utility called Google2SRT that can convert such an XML into an SRT, but using this Greasemonkey script you can just load the YouTube video page and download+convert the captions in one single step. It doesn't get any easier than that.