The iPhone YouTube application lets you email and bookmark favourite clips.
Google's online video sharing site is one of the web's most popular, so it was little wonder that as it has been working so closely with Apple on several initiatives over the years, it should also feature on the iPhone.
The application is a custom-written front end to the site, allowing you to watch featured and most viewed movies from the opening screen, or search for new videos. Tapping the 'more' button lets you search for top rated and most recently added videos, trawl your history, watch movies you have uploaded yourself, and manage your subscriptions and playlists.
The presentation is excellent, with a thumbnail of each video, details of when it was uploaded, how it has been rated by other YouTube visitors and how long it lasts. Clicking the blue arrow beside each one will start them playing.
Steve Jobs said the iPhone was the best way to view YouTube, and it is easy to sec why. Apple has taken an already-excellent website and wrapped it in a first-class interface that simply blows the browser-based version out of the water. If this is what the future of TY-on-the-go is destined to be, it can't help but succeed.
Not only is it largely free from advertising - at least until Google starts to roll out ads wholesale across the videos - but it takes full advantage of the iPhone's high-resolution screen, cutting out the surrounding web page, so you can focus entirely on the video content. In addition, now that Google has encoded YouTube's content using 11.264, the results arc sharper than ever.
For the sake of an easy introduction, click on the most viewed option and pick a video from the list.
Controlling playback
YouTube is a landscape application, so turn your iPhone through 90° with the earpiece to the left to get the best view, and click on play to start the show. After a moment, the controls will fade away, but tapping the screen at any point during playback will call them up, allowing you to change the volume by dragging the slider at the bottom of the screen, pause by clicking on the central button, and skip either forwards in the playlist or back to the beginning of the current clip using the transport buttons to either side.
At the top, you will see the timeline. This shows you how long the clip lasts and how far you arc through it. By pressing and dragging the little progress indicator, you can move backwards and forwards quickly through a clip to either skip to the action or relive a laugh-out-loud moment.
On the furthest extremes of the lower control panel where you pause and change the volume are two extra buttons. One looks like an open book, and the other an envelope. Clicking on the book icon saves a link to the current movie in your YouTube bookmarks, letting you quickly re-find it in the future. Clicking on the envelope will attach the same reference to a new email, allowing you to share it with a friend.
One final button, showing two arrows in the top-right corner of the interface switches between shrinking the playback window so that it all fits on screen, and maximising it so that it fills the window, but with a little chopped off either top and bottom or left and right.
When the clip comes to an end, the iPhone switches back to the upright display and calls up the best YouTube interface of all. From here, you can share or bookmark the clip, play it again or view other clips on a similar theme. Scroll down the page to pick a new clip or use the Bookmark and Share buttons to save or spread the movie.
Organising your bookmarks
When you arc watching videos, it is all too easy to bookmark almost every one you see, which will make your bookmarks list close to useless. From time to time, you arc going to have to thin them down, or the true gems will be lost among the general clutter. Click on the Bookmarks button on the bottom bar, then hit Edit at the top. This will shift your video selections to the right to make way for a red delete button beside each one. Tap the button beside the movie you want to delete, then confirm by pressing the Delete button to the right. It will now slide off to the left of the screen and the remaining bookmarks will rearrange to fill the gap.
Solving the YouTube stutter
Don't forget that these videos arc streamed live over the net. That means YouTube performance may suffer at busy times of the day, when network traffic is high or there are lots of users watching. If you would rather not
watch your video piecemeal, click on the pause button and let the progress bar fill up some way before resuming playback. This should give you enough of a buffer to get all the way through the video without any further stalling.
Taking things further
Once you have finished viewing a video, you are presented with further information about the video, including tags, category, and any comments that have been posted by other viewers (below). Tapping the Rate, Comment or Flag button just below the Tags lets you add your own thoughts to the discussion. You can only do this if you have a YouTube account with password.
In order to sign up, visit youtube.com in a regular browser and click the Create Account link at the top of the page. If you are already logged in to Gmail, Google Mail or any other Google service you will probably need to log out first.
Once you have viewed your chosen clip, clicking More Videos will take you to a list of other postings from the same user. Clicking the left-facing arrow at the top of the screen that bares the clip's name will take you to a list of related videos from all YouTube users, allowing you to find similar short movies online.
No comments:
Post a Comment