Playing YouTube Videos on Your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV

Here is a very useful guide for anyone looking to play videos on your ipod,iphone,or apple tv.

Watching your favorite YouTube videos is fun. But how do you take them with you to watch on your iPod or iPhone? In this article, "YouTube 4 You" author Michael Miller explains how.

There’s nothing more entertaining that watching your favorite YouTube videos. But how do you watch YouTube when you’re on the go and don’t have a computer handy? Well, if you have a video iPod, you can download YouTube videos from the web to your iPod, to watch wherever you happen to be, at your own convenience.

How do you get a video from the YouTube site to your iPod—or to your iPhone or Apple TV device? It’s not necessarily intuitive, but it can be done. Read on to learn how.

Downloading YouTube Videos to Your iPod

If you have a fifth-generation video iPod, you’re probably looking for new (and low-cost) videos to play on your iPod. YouTube videos are ideal for iPod playback—after they’ve been properly converted, that is.

You see, the videos on the YouTube site are normally streamed to your web browser in .FLV format, using the Adobe Flash Player. To play a YouTube video on your iPod, you first need to download the .FLV format file to your computer’s hard drive and then convert the file to the MPEG-4 file format (with.MP4 or .MPV file extensions) used by the iPod. Once saved and converted, you can import the file into the iTunes software, and then transfer the file from iTunes to your iPod for mobile viewing.

There are several programs that perform this download-and-convert process. The most popular of these programs include the following:

• Free YouTube to iPod Converter (free, Windows)
• iTube (free, Windows)
• Ivy Video Converter ($15, Windows)
• TubeSock ($15, Macintosh)

Online, the vixy.net Online FLV Converter website downloads and converts any YouTube video to iPod video format, with no software necessary. The service is free.

Of all these iPod conversion tools, my favorite is iTube, a free program that offers some nice features, chief among them the ability to perform both the download and the conversion process in a single step. (That is, you don’t have to download the videos first, outside the program.) When you launch iTube, the program displays a dialog box. Enter the YouTube video URL into the Page URL box; then click Go. iTube downloads the video, automatically converts it to iPod format, and then imports it into your iTunes video library. The next time you connect your iPod to your computer, the video is transferred to your iPod for viewing on the go. It’s the easiest way I know to download YouTube videos to your iPod.

To watch YouTube videos on your iPod, simply open the Movies menu. That’s where all the saved and converted videos are stored. Choose from the videos listed, and then click the Play button.

Playing YouTube Videos on Your iPhone

If you’re one of the early adopters who are using the Apple iPhone, you can view YouTube videos on your iPhone from wherever you have Internet service. A YouTube applet is built into the iPhone interface, which makes viewing YouTube videos as easy as pressing a few buttons. (And YouTube has facilitated the process by converting all their .FLV-format videos to the H.264 format, which is what Apple uses for iPhone video playback.)

To view a YouTube video on your iPhone, press the YouTube button on the main screen. This connects your iPhone to the YouTube site and displays five buttons along the bottom of the screen: Featured, Most Viewed, Bookmarks, Search, and More. Select any of the first three buttons and you’ll see a list of videos onscreen; scroll through this list and tap a video to begin playback. To search the YouTube site for a specific video, press the Search button and enter your query using the iPhone’s onscreen virtual keyboard.

Once a video loads, turn your iPhone sideways to view the video in widescreen mode. Tap once on the touchscreen to bring up the onscreen transport controls. You use these controls to pause, stop, fast forward, and rewind the video.

Note that when you watch a YouTube video on your iPhone, you’re doing it in real time, via streaming video; the video is not saved to your iPhone. This means you’ll want to be connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot for best viewing. It’s an unfortunate fact that AT&T’s Edge network isn’t quite fast enough for satisfactory streaming of large video files.

By the way, the iPhone isn’t the only mobile phone you can use to watch YouTube videos. YouTube Mobile is available for any web-enabled mobile phone. Just point your cell phone’s web browser to m.youtube.com and settle in for some on-the-go viewing!

Playing YouTube Videos on Your Apple TV

Many iPod fans are purchasing Apple TV units so they can watch and listen to their iTunes media on their home entertainment systems. Apple TV is nothing more than a big iPod for the living room—or maybe it’s a small computer, depending on how you look at it. It’s a small box that connects to your home computer network, your television set, and your home audio system.

When you’re connected to the Internet, you can use Apple TV to view YouTube videos. Just select YouTube from the main menu and you’ll see a new screen full of YouTube-related options: Featured, Most Viewed, Most Recent, Top Rated, History, and Search. Select the Log In option to log into your existing YouTube account, and then you can use Apple TV to access your favorite and recently viewed videos, as well to search the YouTube site for other videos to watch.

Select a YouTube video and it will appear in a window in the top left corner of the Apple TV screen. Information about the video appears just below it, and related videos are displayed to the right. Use the controls on your Apple TV remote to play, pause, stop, fast-forward, and rewind the current video.

Note that not all YouTube videos are currently available for Apple TV or iPhone viewing. YouTube is in the process of converting all of its videos to the H.264 format, which is necessary for viewing on Apple TV and the iPhone. They expect all videos to be converted by fall of 2007.