Sittiphol Phanvilai has updated the Mobitubia client to 1.76 for S60 3rd Edition models to fix a bug, one big huge one in fact; that bug is Youtube.com. After they had tweaked their site so that 3rd party Youtube clients would not work any more with their site, (which also included emTube), giving users the "Video Not Found" error.
Now I don't have a problem with Youtube saying that they don't want their content to be accessed directly by 3rd party applications, but what other alternative is there? The official Youtube client? Have they actually seen the quality of the playback on that? Now I don't know about you, but from where I stand, this is just Youtube crippling the progress and evolution of potentially 2 great applications. Why not just work with the developers and make a great application which works?
Do not stand in the way of evolution Youtube, either embrace it or get out of the way. Just like time, evolution waits for no one.
Luckily this latest update for Mobitubia fixes this issue and you can enjoy it still, just go to the official website to download it. The client supports (tested:)
*Note, the Nokia N95 8GB is also supported, but if you are running on V15 firmware you do know that you have native Youtube.com support? This means you can watch Youtube videos on the full Youtube .com website. You can try either or both if you prefer.
Mobitubia Updated to 1.76, Youtube.com Problem fixed
BBC iPlayer Heading to N95 and NSeries Soon?
Reading the post by Anthony Rose on the availability of the BBC iPlayer for the iPhone it would be safe to assume that it will be made available for the Nokia N95 soon.
Anthony describes the basic concept behind the scenes which would allow the BBC iPlayer to be made available to various other platforms and devices. The solution would be to divide devices into two different categories; those that include a web browser and those that don't. Obviously the Nokia N95 would fall into the former category, which then would require to simply load the BBC iPlayer website and enjoy. Simple or is it?
Firstly the problem would be how to get the content onto the N95 and other N Series devices. The iPlayer works by streaming content using a flash player, which currently is supported only by the Nokia N95 8GB running on the latest firmware and the N Series Tablets from Nokia.
Loading up the player on any of the other devices would not give you access to the player nor the content. The simple solution would be to optimise the iPlayer and the content to stream in MP4, a video format supported by a majority of the devices.
So can we expect an optimised version of the BBC iPlayer for the N Series and streaming H.264 content soon? Why not? Seems like a very positive yes from Anthony Rose.
via Nokia Creative
Nokia N95 8GB DLNA Walkthrough
The lovely Christina takes you through the ins and outs of how to use your Nokia N95 8GB via your home network.
The N95 8GB was given the approval and became a Certified DLNA (The Digital Living Network Alliance) device.
It's great to be able to share content from your handset to your Playstation 3 or Media Centre PC etc.. Sharing is the future it seems.
Video Streaming
Now I'm one of those people who don't actually make many calls or SMS using my mobile phone. I prefer my device to be an all singing all dancing device. As when I travel I like to keep what I carry to a minimal. Hence why I got the N95 I guess.
I don't need to take my iPod or MP3 player with me, don't need my Camera, nor do I need my portable DVD player.
Take note on the last device. No I don't want to watch a whole film on my N95, I'm sure I can, what I want to do is watch short clips, an episode or two of Family Guy or any other sitcom which I might like to watch on my journey.
I've been searching the net for a little while now looking for sites which would stream videos to my N95. So far I've come across quite a few sites which have made an impression on me. They may not have as much choice as YouTube, Dailymotion or Metacafe, but you can't stream the videos to your handset from those sites yet as the Flashlite player doesn't support it, Something I hope someone out there could remedy soon.
There are two sites you can subscribe to via the Nokia Video Centre application in the N95; YouTube Beta and Reuters I will review YouTube Beta in this post.
The following sites have caught my attention and I found I've spent some decent time on them (all for researching purposes I assure you):
ZooVision
This is one of my favourite out of the lot, The site is well designed, it's got some good graphics, but not too much to slow down your browsing via slower connections. The videos are catalogued into categories and there is also a Top Ten section for the most viewed videos. The content could be added to as there isn't that much on there to browse through, but the overall design and the fact it worked every time I visited deserves praise.
MovieDigital Mobile
The site is virtually test based, the ability to only sort videos in alphabetical order or posted date order leaves a lot to be desired. Some videos do not work either, which I find surprising as there is a link to which I presume is their file hosting service, where you can upload your own vidoes to stream and watch on your device via the MovieDigital Mobile site.
FreeBe TV
This site I was pretty excited about, watching streaming TV channels on your mobile device, awesome! So here I decided to register and get my link etc. I looked at the listing of the channels; Monkey News Network, TV Bloopers, Kung Fu Tv etc...
Not your most popular channels to say the least, but what the heck I nosedived in.
The site is mostly text based with only the FreeBe TV logo at the top. Below you find the channels to navigate your way through them to find what you desire. As usual I navigated to the Top Ten section.
The videos themselves were poor quality, encoded at low bitrates, they did not look too good on the big N95 screen.
The concept and potential for this is very good, this site just needs a bit of quality and some interesting channels to hit it off.
TinyTube
TinyTube basically catalogues and reformats videos found on other popular sites like Google Videos, Youtube etc and streams them to your device in a compatible format, mostly 3GP. The quality of the videos themselves are pretty good. There is a choice of browsing via Genre from a specific site or using the search function to look for videos of your choice. The site is not heavy on graphics so it would be suitable for 3G streaming.
YouTube Beta
Everyone knows what YouTube is, if you don't where have you been?
YouTube Beta is obtained by subscribing via Nokia's Video Centre site, after which you will get a new YouTube Logo in your Video Centre menu.
Clicking on it will lead you to a thumbnail based list which refreshes (to what and where I do not know) revealing a list of videos, Just browse and select one to play. As you'd expect, this is pretty easy to use and the quality of the videos are top notch also. I hope this gets bigger and better and YouTube Beta becomes finalised, because this could take the boredom out of any situation and perhaps create some trouble for potential slackers.
Mobile9
This might sound strange as I'm an admin on the site itself and the fact I'm on there everyday. I guess I've taken it for granted, but I just happened to browse through the videos section of the site to find a huge selection. Videos can be downloaded in either 3GP or Mp4 format to your PC or your handset for your viewing pleasure. Looks like I'll be in there for a while as there is a whopping 124 pages to go through.
I'll be honest and let you know, it's not the best site suited for browsing via your handset, as it wasn't designed for that, but with the N95's browser it's pretty easy, you just need to zoom out to 50% to make it manageable.
In general I think streaming video/TV needs a kick push, it's got great potential, especially with Flash and mp4 moving forward with smaller file sizes and great compression methods. I hope in a years time we still aren't sitting around searching the internet to find videos to stream to our devices to entertain on our journey to work or just something to pass the time.
