NewsGator Go! and Video/YouTube Playback

October 5th, 2006

One of the features I am working on now for NewsGator Go! is support for fetching and consuming RSS enclosures.  The most common use case for this is to download podcasts (typically mp3’s) for later playback.  This works very well.

Another great use case would be to consume YouTube videos on my device… YouTube has a bunch of great RSS feeds, so I thought it would be a clear winner for NewsGator, YouTube, and ultimately consumers.

No such luck, there is no way to playback the videos on the mobile device.  I can get at the underlying .flv stream but have no way to render - the existing Windows Mobile Flash Player does not support the encoding.  Doh!  There are ways to do this manually, but it is a pain for non-geeks. That just doesn’t cut it.

Here are a few links that describe this manual process if interested…

http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=124559 - you can do this all from your device by basically using a proxy service as the converter and then launching the file from your device

http://max.limpag.com/2006/09/15/from-google-video-youtube-to-your-phone-in-3-steps/ - download to desktop, convert, copy to device

So, I can get this to work, but my wife wouldn’t have a clue how to pull this off.  If she had an app like NewsGator Go! where she subscribed to a YouTube feed and it automagically appeared and played, that would be a winner.

I was also poking around the Adobe site and found this:

Can I use the File Format Specification to create a SWF interpreter or player?

–> No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF).

Can I use the File Format Specification to create a Flash Video encoder or a Flash Video streaming service

–> No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF).

That is a bummer.. it sure would be nice to make this a frictionless process…

I still have a few ideas I am persuing, so stay tuned for that.

Entry Filed under: Mobile