YouTube Mobile goes live

Happy Sunday to you all!

Looks like mobile version of YouTube has gone live. As a techie I was excited to see how they have implemented it, and here’s how it looks like:
- 3GP/RTSP streaming video (no downloads)
- video codec H.263, audio codec AMR-NB
- video bitrate ~34kbps

So they have clearly went with the lowest common denominator strategy and there seems to be no adaptation based on the mobile terminal. These days when mainstream S60 devices have MPEG-4/AVC, better audio and 3G/WLAN it’s a bit disappointing but maybe this is just the first version of the service.

Of course this isn’t the only way to see “social media” stuff on a S60 device. The N95 has Video Center application (see picture) which combines support for RSS and background downloading. Nokia Video Manager (PC add-on application) does on-the-fly transcoding for some video services out there. The N95 and similar devices have actually enough horsepower so you can just download any iPod or PSP compatible video and it will play out just fine. I probably forgot something here so send in your favorites if you like!

The Nokia Internet tablets (like N800) have a cool feature that’s yet to be implemented on S60: support for Flash Video. That enables full YouTube (or Metacafe etc.) service directly with the web browser. Can’t wait to see if and when this becomes available on S60 as well!

-Jukka