N900 Youtube app
At the end of last week, I put packages for flv and ffmpeg gstreamer plugins into maemo extras-devel for fremantle (the version of Maemo that ships in the N900). With those packages, the N900 can play flv files from youtube and elsewhere but there was no app making use of it except the built in media player which one would have to write a mafw plugin for the different sites. So on Sunday afternoon, after a good round of golf (albeit some really crappy short putts missed) I decided to try and write a youtube browser and player. After 20 minutes (and code to parse youtube stuff borrowed from Canola2), I had a start. It would get the top rated videos list from you tube and display them in a pannable area as a list of buttons. Tapping a button would play the clip with GStreamer’s playbin2.
Then I thought maybe the app could be more useful to others with a little work, I gave the app a name: zoutube. I gave the app a crappy icon (icon designers feel free to contribute a nicer icon) and added debian packaging stuff. I made the app show a list of YouTube’s categories as well as Recently Features, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Recent as the front screen before it showed the videos. The next features I plan are:
- search
- show full description
- seek bar when playing
- download
- thumbnail of video
Please try it out, it is in extras-devel if you have it enabled, it will appear as zoutube in the App Manager on your N900 under Internet and Networking. Also feedback welcome and appreciated. Screenshots here (video not in player screenshot because screenshotting on N900 does not show accelerated video overlay):
November 9th, 2009 at 10:55 am
hey good stuff man !!!
look like a great app in future !
good luck !
November 9th, 2009 at 11:18 am
I’m testing this app, really nice work.
There is a bug, where if a video title is too long it just goes off screen and you can’t scroll to the right to see the rest of it. And because of the length of the title, all the buttons are cut off on the right side.
Here’s a screenshot: http://imgur.com/ryxdd.png
I have a few UI suggestions (tl;dr - make it look like the default media player):
- use the main menu
- full screen playback by default and only that mode, centered throbber to indicate buffering (the five flashing dots animation)
- on-screen Play/Pause button, similar to the one in the default N900 media player
- treat a category a user chooses (e.g. Top Rated) like a media playlist and offer on-screen previous/next buttons, like in the default media player.
- i18n support via Transifex.net
November 9th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
neat! have you tried the youtube support in gPodder? you can probably take some code (especially the download-related stuff - there are more formats than just FLV and fmt_id 18 works great with the default installation on the N900 - no additional plugins needed) from
http://repo.or.cz/w/gpodder.git/blob/HEAD:/src/gpodder/youtube.py
The interesting function is get_real_download_url().
HTH.
Thomas
BTW: It would be nice if you could show the option to subscribe to a user’s channel with gPodder from within your UI. Get in touch if you’re interested, and we can work something out.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
You should be using libgdata for parsing YouTube stuff!
November 9th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
@Tomasz thx for feedback, hope you got my mail.
@thp great! will ping you on irc.
@Philip Withnall I know, I know - this started as a 20 min hack involving copy/paste!
November 10th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Please, Please… portrait mode with smooth transition allowing acelerometer,try it plz…
November 18th, 2009 at 1:43 am
يوتيوب الان شاهد ما تريد
November 19th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Youtube is my super favorite website. I cant spend a day without watching music videos on Youtube.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:53 am
Great post. Thanks for this really. I am not a blog reglar blog reader but this blog is truly amazing indeed.
November 26th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
can you add more video services like the the Open Video Hub application for S60?
http://www.openvideohub.com/
Great work. Looking forward to watching its development.
January 3rd, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Youtube is one of the best Web 2.0 service on the internet today. I really love watching music videos and funny video clips on Youtube.
January 14th, 2010 at 7:46 pm
Thanks alot for this wonderful app!
Could it be possible to add support for the HQ videos in the next update?
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:58 pm
zoutube does not download video on my n900, I don’t have le download window, but it working on the n900 of my friend
what’s the problem ?