It's interesting watching some of the side deals being done around the iPhone. Apparently YouTube are going to make all their video catalog available in higher quality H.264 format. Ostensibly for iPhone compatibility, but note that all S60 3rd Edition FP1 devices and many older Nseries devices (e.g. N73, N93, N80, etc.) have H.264 video compatibility. Hopefully YouTube pages will soon come with a hook or link for smartphones to follow and play?
Read on in the full article.
In response to the "crappy .3gp format" comment - er - .3gp is just a file format and so it doesn't make sense to compare it to video compression schemes like H.263, H.264, MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC) etc.
In fact .3gp files can contain H.263 or H.264 video streams, while flash video files typically contain H.263 video streams. Also - video compression schemes don't dictate whether the video encoding is high quality or not - the source quality and compression ratio chosen also impact on the video quality.
H.264 should deliver a better user experience as it offers improved encoding efficiency- so better quality/bandwidth trade-off - at the expense of increased encode/decode computational complexity. Hopefully this won't impact device battery life too much!
Er Youtube mobile is up and running?
h t t p://m.youtube.com/
Wifi works fine, but you need to set an access point for the Real player.
m.youtube.com streams H.263 videos, YouTube for iPhone H.264 videos. There is a lightyears difference in quality between those formats.