Widescreen YouTube on AppleTV!

Last month Apple anounced YouTube for Apple TV, and it was released on Wednesday. I downloaded the update and played with it a bit and I quickly realized there was a definite lack of quantity of available video. There was some speculation last month that not everything would be playable or converted to H.264 versions required for AppleTV, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why some videos are available in AppleTV and most aren't.

You can sign in and view your listed of videos marked as favorites, but of the 30 I had previously marked, only 3 were available to play. I went to my computer and marked off another 10, and only 3 more were playable. I did some searches and found usually only 5 or less results for stuff that normally returns 50 or more results.

But the biggest surprise was seeing widescreen video properly handled in the YouTube player on AppleTV. One of my biggest peeves with viewing YouTube on my computer is that anything ripped from a HDTV (16:9 widescreen) source gets smushed into the default player's 4:3 aspect. I was hoping YouTube would someday make their flash player adjust to original source size.

If you do a search for "rodrigo y gabriella" (they're a cool acoustic guitar duo that mix classical and rock techniques) in AppleTV, you only get this one result of the 300+ you get in a computer browser search. But if you play it, it fills the screen of your HDTV with a fairly high quality version of their live set. The odd thing is on your computer, you'll get a vertically compressed version by default and even when shown full-screen.

So it appears the YouTube player for AppleTV only sees a minority of total available YouTube video right now, but of those available, the AppleTV player properly handles aspect ratio accordingly, playing both standard and widescreen aspect ratios. That's something even the browser-based player can't seem to handle.

Comments

[Phil J Leitch]

Aren't there like 74 bajillion videos on YouTube?

While I'm sure (was just thinking about it earlier today) there is probably an entire Google building somewhere full of machines frantically converting everything to be viewable on AppleTV/iPhone, it might take awhile.

As somebody who had only visited YouTube very few times i actually enjoyed being able to view it on my TV today. I still can't get myself to watch any huge amount of video sitting at my desk. I prefer relaxing on my couch or bed.

[wallywld]

The reason that you only see some stuff is that not all the YouTube contentl has been converted to H.264yet. The support for H.264 is the reason the clips look nice on the AppleTV. As more clips get converted, you will see more hits.

[Taco Jack]

Apple rolled out Mac OS X 10.4.10 on the same day and I was hoping the YouTube feature would make it into Front Row as well. Alas. No such luck.

[Mo]

What's stopping Tivo from adding a YouTube link to Series2 units? Is it only a matter of $$$ or is the hardware not up to snuff?

[Jesse]

It, uh, needs to be *converted* to play on the Apple TV? Seriously? The Wii costs less and plays Flash video just fine. FFmpeg decodes Flash video for free (and is what XBMC uses). The Apple TV is just sounding like a worse and worse deal as time goes by.

[Grover]

@Jesse
Nintendo doesn't have a vested interest in promoting it's own media foundation. Apple does. Not saying you as a consumer should care, but that's why. You'll also never see ffmpeg in a product from a large company. Too much patent gray area there.

Apple TV is solely for playing iTunes Store content. If your content isn't Fairplay'd, then there's almost no reason to buy one.

@Mo
To play on most Tivos, YouTube would have to convert to MPEG-2 (more than double usually), which is gigantic relative to FLV or H.264. There's a reason that those TivoCasts are 5 minutes tops.

[Mike]

You can play You Tube videos on the TV by using GB PVR software (its free) and using a Media MVP.