You Tube Mobile goes live using H.263 streaming

I was reading the Multimedia Blog at S60.com and found this interesting post from Jukka. He was the first to report the oficial mobile version of YouTube, Nokia and YouTube announced the partnership earlier this year at 3GSM in Barcelona to put the videos on Nokia’s Nseries phones.

You can check it out by yourself at http://m.youtube.com, the specifications according to Jukka are:

• 3GP/RTSP streaming video (no downloads), when you click in any video it opens the RealPlayer.
• video codec H.263, audio codec AMR-NB
• video bitrate ~34kbps
• Streaming Server: Darwin Streaming Server v5.5.3 (Open Source) running on Linux

I’ve tested for a while on my E61 (using Wifi and EDGE) and worked pretty well, the audio and video quality is far from good, but you can definitely watch something and have a preview of the video on the go. Just one clue, don’t even bother to watch sports videos, they look terrible.

It’s interesting to see that the YouTube guys are using H.263, besides the fact that the new Symbian/Windows Mobile and other OS flavor phones already support MPEG-4, certainly the focus is on the mass. I hope they offer other options in the near future including the possibility to download the videos instead of streaming it.

Here are some screenshots:

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