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iPhone's "Mystery App" Is H.264 YouTube
Rebelgecko writes "It turns out the iPhone's mystery app is a custom YouTube viewer. The iPhone will play YouTube's videos using the H.264 codec(as will the AppleTV after an upgrade) for higher quality. From the look of it, it will take advantage of the iPhone's screen design and touch capabilities much more than watching videos in the iPhone's version of Safari would. The videos can be streamed via a Wi-Fi connection or the EDGE network."
Shouldn't the inbuilt browser be able to view YouTube anyways?
It is really interesting, from a marketing point of view, how Apple takes things that would be ho-hum for any other brand or company, and suddenly turns it into front page news with the whole "mystery feature" game. They do this over and over and over, and nobody ever seems to catch on.
I mean, realistically, it's just another smartphone in an already overcrowded market. But it's front page news every day.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Looks like it pays off to have a google member sitting on your board. You get access to the phone's "real" API's.
This is more evidence that if you want to write a killer iPhone app, Safari+AJAX may not have the power you need. Apple sure didn't find that combo to have the horespower when it went to implement Google Maps and now YouTube.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
if they could only make it to, like, surf myspace too. that'd make it totally worth the money. i'd buy two of them just so i can do both at the same time.
They are using H.264 instead of Flash for the iPhone and Apple TV.
I don't know how many times my wife has been driving and I, sitting in the passenger seat bored out of my mind, thought to myself...
{dream sequence}
Damn I wish I could see a short clip of kittens doing cute things or kids doing lightsaber battles
{/dream sequence}
My life is now complete.
load "$",8,1
Also, there's a USA Today article on iPhone today with the first new information from AT&T on the launch (even though it's not much):
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2 007-06-20-at&t-iphone-push_N.htm
AT&T girds for iPhone launch on June 29
By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
For consumers eager to get their hands on an Apple iPhone, here's the good news: It will be available in all 1,800 AT&T phone stores at 6 p.m. sharp on June 29.
The bad news? "We fully expect one or more of our stores to run out of stock on the first or second day -- my guess is the first day," says Larry Carter, senior vice president of sales for AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive U.S. distributor.
To help accommodate as much foot traffic as possible, AT&T phone stores will stay open an extra hour -- until 10 p.m. -- on the first day.
To get "iReady" for the big day, Carter says AT&T added 2,000 extra sales people to stores. Half will be there just to help handle the expected early crush of buyers. The other half, he says, will stay long-term to help with extra customers the iPhone is expected to draw to AT&T's stores.
Crowd control on launch day is a concern. In some markets -- Carter declined to name them -- AT&T is working with local law enforcement on crowd-control plans. It also has alerted landlords at shopping malls and other phone store locations to make sure nobody is caught off guard.
Not all stores are equal
Carter would not say which stores will have the biggest iPhone stockpiles, but allowed that iPod users are a "natural market" for the smart phone. As such, he says, stores in areas with big numbers of iPod users -- such as New York City, Chicago and much of California -- will be well stocked.
Does that mean that those stores will have more iPhones than stores in, say, Richmond, Va., or Florida? "Yes," he says. "It's just common sense."
If your local store sells out, Carter says sales people will take mail orders, and devices will be shipped in 3 to 5 days, inventory permitting. "Ultimately, we will meet every customer's desire to have one," Carter says.
To discourage sCalpers, AT&T plans to limit how many phones each customer can buy. Carter declined to cite the number, saying only that AT&T would try to prevent "hoarding and reselling."
New service plans for iPhone
There are other surprises in the works for June 29. In addition to launching the iPhone that day, Carter says AT&T also will announce new service plans for it.
He declined to be specific, but says plans will be customized for the iPhone. Translation: The iPhone may offer cool features such as unlimited Web browsing, but you'll have to pay for them.
Carter says the additional fees shouldn't be a surprise. "Regardless of which device you're using today, you pay us a certain amount for (voice) minutes, and you also pay us for data units," he says. "That is also true on the iPhone."
No amount of planning will help, however, if Apple is unable to supply enough phones. "That's what we stay awake at night thinking about," Carter says.
It's also out of AT&T's control. Manufacturing is being overseen by Apple, which also maintains control of design, customer care (for the device, not monthly service), advertising and more.
Apple, famously secretive about its products, has been mum about its Apple Store sales plans. So far, it has not allowed AT&T sales staff access to iPhones so they can get comfortable using them before the big day. "Apple wanted to launch it that way," Carter shrugs.
Only as good as network
One thing AT&T does control, however, is the network on which the iPhone will depend. While network reliability might not have the sex appeal of an iPhone, it could spell the difference between the device becoming a runaway success -- or a flop.
imagine the data charges from watching youtube all day on your iphone
Actually, I think the killer app will be uploading to YouTube from the iPhone. It would be predicated upon the chipset having H.264 encoding capabilities as well, but I see this being a potentially huge win for Apple if they could pull it off. It's the logical extension of what they're attempting to do with the platform, and it would transform video blogging and bring it to the mainstream.
Am I the only one that sees the iPhone as only an (awesome) entertainment device? I might be wrong but I didn't see any spreadsheet or word processing apps. I realize a widget could be written to run some local version of the google office apps but isn't it a bit wasteful?
It would be so awesome of they released a developers kit (and wishful thinking, make it open to everyone). Too bad it's impossible (viruses, ugly inefficient apps and all that).
Whatever the outcome, I'll pay 500 to whoever writes the first 95% compatible full speed widgetized NES emulator with a comfortable input system.
Oh yeah, and gives me an iPhone to test it intensively for five or six years or until the next iPhone comes out.
Looks like they're excellent at partnering with Google(YouTube). And pretty smart about it, too. That H.264 hardware decoder in the iPhone won't sap the battery like a crappy flash player would do.
Well, YouTube videos are delivered at 320x240 resolution, whereas the iPhone has a 480x320 display to work with... of course, much of the source material uploaded to YouTube may be in a lower resolution anyway, since the content authors may not have anticipated having higher resolutions available for their videos later on.
Even at the same resolution and bitrate, however, H.264 is a very high-quality codec and is bound to have higher video quality with less blurring and blocking than Flash Video. The reason YouTube uses flash is that it's loaded on damn near every desktop computer and doesn't require spawning a separate player, installing decoders, etc. But it actually makes sense when targeting a fixed platform like the iPhone or AppleTV to take advantage of the better video formats that are available.
Also, I'd personally love it if YouTube let me set an option in my profile to view H.264 videos as I'm browsing the website. Keep the videos in flash by default, but let people who know they can view embedded H.264 take advantage of it.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
The summary says AppleTV will get it after an upgrade, so presumably any desktop mac will also have that as an option.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
I have my Blackberry Pearl set up as a bluetooth modem for my Macbook Pro and it is on AT&T's EDGE network in NYC. A two minute youtube video takes about four minutes to load, so you can start watching at about the halfway mark.
You don't understand how Apple has this effect because you, like everyone else who's a registered member of Slashdot, are a geek.
Geeks have a higher tolerance for poor user interface design, I mean heck look at how popular Linux, BSD and Unix are amongst the geek set. The "CLI" or Command Line Interface is actually PREFERRED by this set. You take two computers, say either a Windows based PC or Macintosh and compare it to a GUI'less Linux setup and a geek would know that both computers can do anything. A regular person however would consider the Linux computer to be useless because they wouldn't know how to nor would they be interested in taking the time to learn how to use it. If it isn't point and click, it loses. Geeks don't mind investing the time though, they LOVE to tinker.
This is why you consider the iPhone to be nothing special. I own a Treo 700p that can already do all the things the iPod can do just about and there are certainly Windows Mobile and Symbian phones that also do most of what the iPhone does at a much lower price. But thats NOT THE POINT. Its not about matching features for features. Its about making sure that people will actually be able and WILLING to use the features that your product DOES have.
I am absolutely positively certain that regular folks will get more use out of their iPhones then they will out of their Treos, HTCs, Motorola Qs, Blackberries, Nokias...etc simply because the iPhone has the better interface. Regular folks have higher standards when it comes to interfaces. Either its going to be well designed or it won't be used. Geeks on the other hand will put up with crappy user interfaces because they are blinded by the features underneath. The truest test is when a user buys a device on their own and no longer needs their "geek" friend/neighbor/co-worker to set it up for them. Thats the iPhone.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Yes, it is the "mystery app." The "mystery app" was caused by the application icons being slid down one slot in a brief section of an iPhone ad. Well, they've updated the iPhone website and the new iPhone graphic shows all twelve application icons. They are, in order:
YouTube is the app that's been added. It's the "mystery app" that was missing from before.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
First, "Flash Video" is commonly H.263, not some magically Adobe-only codec. You don't need flash to play the video.
Second, the article title talks about YouTube providing H.264 content, which is a format the iPhone and iPod are already known to play.
Obviously you can use it for streaming as well, though I don't know if you get the same bandwidth comparisons vs. the most popular streaming-video codecs, since there are so many of those out there. According to one of the Wikipedia pages, newer iPods support H.264 video formats, so they're capitalizing on those sales. And they're probably cutting down on the bandwidth required for YouTube, which is really important in a mobile data environment.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was pretty close to adding a Flash version to the existing QT (H.264) and WMV formats I currently offer clients, but the quality just wasn't there. It's great for talking head and animations, but try boosting the bit rate to make it useful for "full-motion" clips longer than a minute or so and the file sizes get too big to do anything with.
I think YouTube has done the right thing to go with H.264, and it's a really big deal for Apple on so many levels...and yet another nail in Microsofts all powerful wmv.
Yes, it is, in fact. It uses the same 30-pin dock connector as all current iPods and will physically fit in Made for iPod products. Whether or not they do some weird things with the software that prevent the iPhone from responding to these accessories is something no one outside of a very small number of people at Apple know, but I'd guess no.
They're selling this thing as a full-featured iPod nano (with some new features, even). I'd imagine that the small reserve of people who still haven't bought an iPod (ignoring those who never, ever will, no matter what) would further translate into an accessory market. The thing is almost exactly the width of a current iPod, the dock connector is the same and in the same location, and it syncs with iTunes and not some new application just for the iPhone. All signs point to "yes, it will work with iHome and all of those other dock accessories."
If any tool requires you to use "critical thinking skills" in comparison to a competing tool that does not, than the former tool "fails" at being the best it can be. Critical thinking skills should be reserved for making actual decisions, not simply getting a product to work.
"Decent" interfaces that you point out on competing smartphones just aren't good enough anymore when something better comes along. That something better is the iPhone. All that "decent" stuff that came before is although still quite usable, now dated and obsolete. Its yesterdays news.
Your position is almost comical. People spend hundreds of dollars on these devices and you are actually opposed to a product so easy to use that its "chewing your food for you." You personally, after spending this much money on a device actually WANT to have to do mental work to get the most out of it. Thats like spending full price for a car that you have to put together yourself when everyone else's is pre-constructed and drivable off the lot. Ha ha worked a car analogy in! Damn these users for wanting to get the most bang for their buck! Why they're wimps! REAL users know better than to expect exlimplary service and products when they hand over their cash!
Perhaps you should start a company that would sell devices based on your design preferences.
1. A hammer that has a loose neck that will only stiffen strong enough to be used after you enter into a keypad on the handle the first 56 digits of Pi.
2. A light switch that requires you to recite the Gettysburgh Address in order to function.
3. A weight scale that requires you to tap dance like Fred Astaire for 15 minutes before it will tell you your weight.
4. And lastly a dishwasher with a panel on the front that will require you to specify the exact amounts of water used, at what pressure and what temperatures and what amounts of detergent to be released at 50 different intervals during the wash cycle before you can use it.
After all, we want to make sure that absolutely NO ONE is forced to use a product that makes completeing tasks TOO EASY. If you are forced to use a product that spoon feeds you everything it stifles the development of CRITICAL THINKING skills.
You could call your company, Idiot Enterprises Incorporated.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Absolutely. The low EDGE speeds are supposedly mitigated by the fact that the phone will automatically use wifi if it is available. I don't see this working well, in practice. The reason I got an internet plan with my cell provider was precisely because most of the time, I'm not in an area with wifi, or I'm in an area with locked down wifi. Add to this the recent problems people have been having for using wide-open wifi without the permission of the owner, and this just looks like a disaster waiting to happen (though, perhaps, the iPhone will spur people to either lock down their access points, or will spur legislation explicitly defining when it is ok to connect to a wide-open access point.)
When I'm at home, I'm going to use my own Internet connection. When I'm at a coffee shop, I'll be using my notebook. At work, I'll have the work's connection. I guess if I'm at a friend's house without my notebook, this might be useful, but hey, I could just borrow his computer.
No, I think that Youtube won't be the killer app that Apple expects it to be. Although, who knows? If people don't think about how slow it's going to be over EDGE, it might be just enough to convince some people (who otherwise wouldn't) to buy. But I doubt it.