[General Topics] Menneisyys:
There have been several YouTube players for Windows Mobile, two of them being, in my opinion, the best: the commercial, but highly recommended CorePlayer (which, with the recent, 1.3.0 upgrade, has fixed almost all the problems I’ve talked about in my dedicated all-in-one bible) and the free FlashVideoBundle. While some of the alternatives (for example, Kinoma Play with the built-in YouTube support and the recently released Flash Lite 3.1) offer more functionalities (for example, built-in account support in Kinoma) and/or better (more “natural”) browser integration, in my opinion, these two players still remain the best choices for YouTube playback, particularly if you have a VGA device.

Enter YouTube’s own player. First of all, before you run to download it: at the current state, I in no way recommend it. It’s in every way worse than CorePlayer: it’s less polished, uses much more CPU for playback and is simply not optimized for being played back on VGA devices, resulting in sometimes ridiculous frame rates. It doesn’t support videos with greater resolution than QVGA either, which is bad news for (W)VGA users having enjoyed the higher-resolution HVGA (480*320) H.264 movies. It seems not to able to work (connect) on some phones; for example, using exactly the same WLAN network, I was able to play back videos (hmmm… more like slideshows on this VGA unit) on my HP iPAQ 210 but couldn’t do the same on my HTC Wizard and HTC Universal phones and my Dell Axim x51v – they complained about connection errors. Again, all this under exactly the same (networking) circumstances.

All in all, it seems this title is worse as the official Symbian version (see 1.3 Using the official YouTube MIDlet, YouTube for Mobile (beta) (currently, Symbian)) of YouTube’s player.

Example screenshots

Main menu of the player, allowing for accessing the search, top rated, most viewed and most recent categories. The menu (right softkey), as can be seen in the following screenshot, only allows for returning to this screen and bringing up the related list; that is, there’s absolutely no for example account support (unlike with Kinoma’s player or solutions based on the Web – Flash Lite 3.1, the native mobile Web version, http://m.youtube.com, of YouTube or FlashVideoBundle).

A search result. The screen can’t be scrolled down to, for example, see the comments. With more than one search result, the icons can be scrolled from left to right with fingers. Tapping them starts the playback in Landscape. An example screenshot of this:

Installation

Nevertheless, if you still want to give it a try (you’ve been warned…), head to http://m.youtube.com in the built-in Internet Explorer Mobile (unfortunately, it seems alternative browsers like Opera Mobile aren’t supported – I’ve tested the latter with the Omnia build of Opera Mobile 9.5) and click the “Download the YouTube application” link at the bottom, just above the YouTube application copyright message:

If, on the next screen, you’re told your particular model isn’t supported (this will be the case if you aren’t located in an English-speaking country; some people also state the same trick is also needed in English-speaking ones), just click the “Change Language” link at the bottom. The following screenshot shows this (selected) link in Finnish (“Muuta kieli”):

On the next dialog, select English (or English UK):

Now, the download will start; just answer Yes to the question:

After this, just click Youtube in Start / Programs.