Alternatives to Brightcove Flash Player on computer

[rgme]

I've become frustrated with the Brightcove media player and its overhead on my computer. Previously, I max out my CPU on my Macbook using it, and if I switch over to an iOS/HTML5 link, I have minimal CPU usage. I remember being able to disable Flash or change browser user agent and have the default mp4 player pop up, but I wasn't able to do that tonight. Are there alternatives to the Brightcove Flash player? How can I natively stream the video, without waiting for a full download? (I tried using the download link to stream in VLC, but that stopped on me...not sure if that is problem on my side, though.)