YouTube
YouTube, of course, is the stratospherically popular video-sharing Web site where people post short videos of every description: funny clips from TV, homemade blooper reels, goofy short films, musical performances, bite-sized serial dramas, and so on. YouTube's fans watch 100 million little videos a day.
Of course, you already have a Web browser on your iPhone—Safari. Why does the iPhone need a special YouTube program?
Long story: Most YouTube movies are in a format called Flash, which iPhone 3.0 still doesn't recognize. Flash video, at least in YouTube's version, doesn't look so great, anyway. YouTube videos are famous for their blurry, mushy look.
So Apple approached YouTube and made a radical suggestion: Why not re-encode all of its millions of videos into H.264, a much higher-quality format that, coincidentally, is playable on the iPhone and the Apple TV? Amazingly enough, YouTube agreed—and you are the lucky benefactor.
Finding a Video to Play
The YouTube program works much like the iPod program in that it's basically a collection of lists. Tap one of the icons at the bottom of the screen, for example, to find videos in any of these ways:
Featured. A scrolling, flickable list of videos handpicked by YouTube's editors. You get to see the name, length, star rating, and popularity ...
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