- Downloading YouTube Videos to Your iPod
- Playing YouTube Videos on Your iPhone
- Playing YouTube Videos on Your Apple TV
Playing YouTube Videos on Your iPhone
If you’re one of the early adopters who are using the Apple iPhone, you can view YouTube videos on your iPhone from wherever you have Internet service. A YouTube applet is built into the iPhone interface, which makes viewing YouTube videos as easy as pressing a few buttons. (And YouTube has facilitated the process by converting all their .FLV-format videos to the H.264 format, which is what Apple uses for iPhone video playback.)
To view a YouTube video on your iPhone, press the YouTube button on the main screen. This connects your iPhone to the YouTube site and displays five buttons along the bottom of the screen: Featured, Most Viewed, Bookmarks, Search, and More. Select any of the first three buttons and you’ll see a list of videos onscreen; scroll through this list and tap a video to begin playback. To search the YouTube site for a specific video, press the Search button and enter your query using the iPhone’s onscreen virtual keyboard.
Once a video loads, turn your iPhone sideways to view the video in widescreen mode. Tap once on the touchscreen to bring up the onscreen transport controls. You use these controls to pause, stop, fast forward, and rewind the video.
Note that when you watch a YouTube video on your iPhone, you’re doing it in real time, via streaming video; the video is not saved to your iPhone. This means you’ll want to be connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot for best viewing. It’s an unfortunate fact that AT&T’s Edge network isn’t quite fast enough for satisfactory streaming of large video files.
By the way, the iPhone isn’t the only mobile phone you can use to watch YouTube videos. YouTube Mobile is available for any web-enabled mobile phone. Just point your cell phone’s web browser to m.youtube.com and settle in for some on-the-go viewing!