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YouTube, iPhone, Flash and H.264 Issues Unresolved [UPDATED]

Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 4:55 PM - by

Now that Apple has announced YouTube content on Apple TV, the question arises as to whether another Mac OS X-based system, the iPhone, will also be able to view that content.

Mac Format asked that question on Thursday, and it has to do with the details of how Safari in the iPhone will handle Flash as well as whether and how future YouTube content will be converted from Flash to H.264 for streaming on Apple TV.

Apple executives were asked after the Macworld 2007 Keynote about Safari on the iPhone. Everyone was told in the Keynote that this is real, full-blown Safari, but the executives evaded a question about viewing Flash content.

It's possible that, even then, they knew that the most important Flash-based site on the planet might be changing over to H.264, so Flash on the iPhone would be moot. Perhaps backwards compatibility for Flash on the iPhone is also being planned.

The details of how all this will work are still not exactly clear, and iPO will update this article as more information becomes available.

[UPDATE: A communication from a YouTube spokesperson confirms that "videos on YouTube are on the H.264 format. In addition, Apple does not provide a converter as YouTube handles the conversions and stores the videos on the site."

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Spider said:

member since 12 Aug 2001 with 2997 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu May 31, 2007 5:14 pm

I was thinking about this after Steve's announcements/talk yesterday. The thing that stuck in my craw was the (paraphrasing here) statement "thousands of videos are already there and by fall all of YouTube will be able to be seen on the AppleTV."

It got me wondering, since the AppleTV doesn't support Flash what would be going on. The only logical explanation would be YouTube moving to H.264 for their content, or creating a specific channel/site for AppleTV with the videos encoded in H.264. I hope they do convert over to H.264 as the Flash really makes my videos look like crap. The conversion process also has issues with iPod M4V video encodes, creating pixelization issues.

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