Official YouTube Mobile Client in beta
Published by Rafe Blandford at 17:42 GMT, January 24th 2008
YouTube has announced an official mobile client application for a number of handsets including several S60 phones. The application allows you to watch any YouTube video and offers browsing by popular videos (most viewed, top rated, featured), related videos or keyword search. You are able to sign into your YouTube account and access your own videos, subscriptions and favourites. The application also allows you to upload video from your phone to YouTube directly.
The application allows you to browse through the massive number of videos on YouTube. Browsing is via video lists which are accessed via keyword search or by the popular video lists (as found on the mobile and PC sites). Video lists are shown in a carousel list similar to that used in S60's Gallery application. Each video is presented with a small thumbnail and related descriptive information.
The client application provides an impressively rich experience and a good effort has been made to retain the look and feel of the website version - the same terminology, and graphics are used. If you use YouTube.com regularly you should feel right at home. The client application is written in Java which may not give the same performance as a native application (I noticed a few slow downs in my initial tests) and has a non-standard UI (like Google's GMail client application) which is not ideal in terms of providing a consistent experience across the phone.
Because the application is obviously heavily reliant on a data connection you should be wary of using it unless you are on a flat rate data tariff (video streaming can add up to a lot of data very quickly). You will also get the best performance in areas with 3G coverage.
Here you can see the Home Screen and the pop up menu for Popular videos followed by the video list screen.
Shown above is the video playback screen which mimics the website look and feel.
The menu, shown in the second screenshot, can be used to navigate to the different
screens / functions including the My Account screen shown in the third screenshot.
In the My Account area you can can access your subscriptions, and view your own videos.
The last screenshot shows a video being selected for upload.
The client uses RealPlayer internals to do the video streaming (you may need to set up your access point settings in RealPlayer to get streaming to work). The video is in .3gp format and is lower quality that the video you get through the website. You'll get a better video quality if you use one of the third party YouTube clients such as emTube.
The client application may also work on other phones, but there are no guarantees. Stefan an IntoMobile notes you can use this link for a direct download (N95 version, should work with most recent S60 phones). Officially supported phones are Nokia's N73, N95, E65, 6110, 6120 and Sony Ericsson's K800 and W880.
Thanks to Biskero.org for the alert.
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Categories: Software
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
News Discussion
Bosambo
emtube has shown what can be done, and using this for only 5 minutes it's easy to see this is a sub-par effort by professionals compared to a hard worker on his own in his bedroom.
Poor
chrsfrwll
Nice interface of this, and comes with the ability to upload and access my account. It looks neat. Nice search facility too and the way results are areturned, with use of spaces allowed. Only problem is, despite selecting my home wifi as the AP it seems to use my GPRS AP (as evidenced by the GPRS icon in the top left) and so I get slooooooow speeds. So black mark there and I can't really use it.
jac57
looked good installed it but had no sound what so ever with the videos nothing thought it was the phone, so got rid of it and installed emtube works great and i have sound...
jpwbamber
To install and use this new official mobile client you have to accept new Youtube terms and conditions. Some of these conditions appear to be aimed at restricting or preventing emtube useage.
From the terms and conditions......
http://uk.youtube.com/t/terms
6. General restrictions on use
C You agree not to access User Submissions (defined below) or other content made available on the Website (including YouTube Content, as defined below) through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Player, or such other means as YouTube may explicitly designate for this purpose;
D You agree not to (or attempt to) circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with any security related features of the Website or features that (i) prevent or restrict use or copying of any User Submissions or YouTube Content or (ii) enforce limitations on use of the Website or the content accessible on the Website;
jal12
Nice looking app, but can't get it work on my Nokia E61i (I know, it's not officially supported). When I try to watch videos, it says "Connection to video streaming server timed out".
chrsfrwll
Quote:
Originally Posted by jac57
l......but had no sound what so ever with the videos nothing thought it was the phone....
|
Not sure if you saw this from the FAQ section:
...Nokia devices, you must have the Warning Tones enabled in your phone's settings to hear audio in YouTube. This setting can be found in "Profiles" > "Current Profile" >
"Personalize" > "Warning Tones."
Unregistered
The sound will not play if you have your profile on silent. Set it to Normal and the sound should work fine. Worked for me on my N95-3.
Sam Stokes
Thanks above for the tip about changing the profile.
I think this is pretty cool. It may not be as fully featured or as written-in-C as emTube, but it actually works on my E61i. emTube skips horribly when playing videos, even if I let it preload the whole video first.
Holme
Hmm... It does not work here. I am using N95 through WiFi with an O2 (Czech Republic) connection, and it says 'could not connect to video streaming server'
I have no problem streaming from m.youtube.com on the browser.
chrsfrwll
Quote:
Originally Posted by Holme
Hmm... It does not work here. I am using N95 through WiFi with an O2 (Czech Republic) connection, and it says 'could not connect to video streaming server'
I have no problem streaming from m.youtube.com on the browser.
|
I've noticed that even though a WiFi AP is selected, the application will try and stream a selected video via GPRS, hence the "could not connect", as the bandwidth isn't big enough. Oddly, it seems to load the Homepage via WiFi though. I've raised this with YouTUbe
Unregistered
This is great. What i do find annoying about Nokia is the way you have to manually confiugure access points in realplayer... and then change these settings each time you move between bearers WiFi/HSDPA.
pennas
I noticed that on the Google Mobile Blog announcement about this, they also mentioned that the mobile website m.youtube.com will now stream the entire youtube catalogue (through RealPlayer). Up until now, this site had an extremely limited selection of videos available (ie not really worth the bother).
I've given it a quick go and seems to work perfectly - I think this might be my chosen solution!
Rafe
Make sure the access point setting is set to your WiFi hotscpot / access point in the Real player application if you want to use WiFi to watch video via YouTube.
Unregistered
I see that support is claimed for the N73 but Youtube tells me that my phone is not supported yet.
On a related note, the m.youtube.com site (which works well on my wi-fi enabled e61) does not work on my N73 (on O2). Has anyone seen this? emtube is great if you don't mind waiting.... the mobile youtube site (when it works) is
better IMO .
Unregistered
Rafe, I think you’re giving Nokia an easy pass with this comment.
"Make sure the access point setting is set to your WiFi hotscpot / access point in the Real player application if you want to use WiFi to watch video via YouTube."
Having to reconfigure realplayer each time just sucks. Simple as that.
jal12
Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
I see that support is claimed for the N73 but Youtube tells me that my phone is not supported yet.
|
You can try an alternative download link suggested
here.
quinncom
YouTube mobile app + e61i = works! Even over a T-mobile EDGE connection -- videos play, although slightly roughly.
Unregistered
Got it installed on my n95 but got an error saying i need to grant it file access. Anyone got that?
Dinesh Jay
If you are getting the messages "Unable to Connect to Server" or "connection to video streaming server timed out" in your Nokia N95 8GB, they you should go to Tools->Settings->Applications->Realplayer->Streaming
and then make sure both the proxy and network values are correct.
I was using a WLAN without a proxy, but for some reason the proxy values were set to something and the network was pointed to some other access point. Everything working once I changed these values.
Menneisyys
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