YouTube
YouTube, of course, is the stratospherically popular video-sharing Web site, where people post short videos of every description: funny clips from TV, homemade blooper reels, goofy short films, musical performances, bite-sized serial dramas, and so on. YouTube's fans watch 100 million little videos a day.
Of course, you already have a Web browser on your iPhone—Safari. Why does the iPhone need a special YouTube program ?
Mainly because of Flash.
Long story: Most YouTube movies are in a format called Flash, which iPhone 2.0 still doesn't recognize. Flash video, at least in YouTube's version, doesn't look so great, anyway. YouTube videos are famous for their blurry, mushy look.
So Apple approached YouTube and made a radical suggestion: Why not re-encode all of its millions of videos into H.264, a much higher quality format that, coincidentally, is playable on the iPhone and the Apple TV?
Amazingly enough, YouTube agreed. (Chalk one up for Steve Jobs' reality distortion field.) At the launch of the iPhone, 10,000 YouTube videos had already been converted; today, the entire YouTube video collection has been converted.
So the YouTube app on the iPhone exists for two reasons. First, it makes accessing YouTube videos much easier than fumbling around at YouTube.com. Second, it saves you time, because it displays only the high-quality H.264-formatted videos and hides the rest.
Finding a Video ...
Get iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
