YouTube videos encoded in H.264 format offering improved quality and battery life on mobile devices.

Apple has announced that YouTube videos will be available on the iPhone when it makes its debut on June 29.

The company says that it has designed a specific YouTube application that will stream YouTube’s re-encoded video clips over a wireless network or EDGE phone connection to the iPhone.

Apple announced earlier this month that YouTube would become available on its AppleTV video streaming device and as part of that rollout, YouTube would be converting originally uploaded video clips into higher-quality H.264/AVC format.

These same clips will be viewable on the iPhone thanks to the phone’s built-in H.264 video codec support.

Apple says that over 10,000 video clips will be viewable on the iPhone on June 29 and that the video website will continue its conversion until the entire video library is converted into H.264, expected to occur in September.

AppleTV owners can already take advantage of the new higher-quality video clips by downloading the free software update that loads in the familiar YouTube interface. However, in addition, AppleTV users will not only be able to view videos but also save them to the AppleTV’s hard drive. This marks the first time that YouTube has officially allowed users to download video clips.

Previously, third-party websites were needed to download YouTube video clips onto a PC or notebook, mainly due to the Flash video format and file serving system used by YouTube.

YouTube iPhone interface already available

While the news of YouTube on iPhone has only now come direct from Apple, the interface is already up and running and available on the YouTube website at http://m.youtube.com however because YouTube is using Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), the videos cannot be played on a Windows PC standard connection.

Trying to do so in Apple’s Safari 3 Beta web browser on a Windows PC returns the following interesting error message:

Can’t open “rtsp://rtsp.youtube.com/youtube/videos/5cBbgzxCxRs/video.3gp” because Microsoft Windows doesn’t recognize Internet addresses starting with “rtsp:”.

RTSP was developed in 1998 to allow simple remote commands such as "play" and "pause" to allow audio-video files to be accessed over the internet. The command structure is similar to internet's HTTP however it uses a session ID to keep track of who's accessing what without the need for keeping open a permanent connection. 

One of the greatest complaints of YouTube was the poor quality of its encoded videos, which were limited to a low 320x240-pixel resolution. YouTube’s ability to re-encode them using H.264 has meant that those original video clips submitted have been stored by YouTube and not dumped after conversion to Flash format as originally thought.

At this stage, there are no details on the encoding bit rate or resolution being used by YouTube in its H.264 conversions.

The new YouTube Mobile interface has been available on www.iphoneapplicationlist.com for the last few days and features clean lines that should make it a hit on the iPhone’s 3.5-inch LCD screen.

The iPhone launches in the US next Friday with the 4GB model selling for $US499 and the 8GB version for $US599.

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."