[DBMandrake]

Anyone who has ever used the iPhone Youtube client on 3G will know how awful the picture and sound quality is no matter how fast your 3G connection is - the reason is the built in Apple Youtube client plays one of two fixed bitrate encodings of the clip - one about 1Mbit for Wifi, and one
What's really needed is for the youtube app to switch to the new H.264 streaming protocol, where it can dynamically adapt the bitrate to the available bandwidth - but so far Apple has chosen not to.

Youtube have just released an updated mobile version of their website which you can access via safari at http://m.youtube.com.

Although the user interface is a bit different to the built in Youtube app, it is rather fast and seems to be full featured, and the most important thing of all is it seems to use the H.264 streaming video protocol, which means it dynamically adapts to the available bandwidth whether Wifi or 3G, and it gives full quality playback on 3G :) (assuming you have enough bandwidth)

I tested it on Three's 3G and although it took around 10-15 seconds to start playing compared to about 5 seconds on Wifi, once it started it played flawlessly, and the quality difference is astounding:

Apple Youtube client on 3G screenshot:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7826218/Forum%20attachments/2010%208%2018%2053%20AM.jpg

m.youtube.com in Safari on 3G screenshot:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7826218/Forum%20attachments/2010%208%2019%2030%20AM.jpg

So anyone wishing to get high quality Youtube playback on 3G, head on over to m.youtube.com :)

(Beware that higher quality video will use your 3G data allowance much faster, so keep an eye on your data usage...)

[Ben]

That's impressive!

It's a shame that video standards are so up in the air at the moment. H.264 does seem really good from my own experience, but the patent concerns aren't going to go away.

But yeah, I'll remember m.youtube.com!

[DBMandrake]

I just did a test on a 3 minute youtube clip and calculated how many MB per minute it uses - approximately 6MB per minute in high quality on m.youtube.com vs 0.75MB per minute in low quality in the youtube app, so roughly 8 times the bitrate. No wonder the difference in quality is so large. (Both use the H.264 codec)

On the stingy 500MB / month data plans of many of the networks, that means your entire monthly cap would be eaten up by just 83 minutes of high quality youtube watching, so barely enough for two TV shows...(minus ads) on the other hand the quality is so low in the default youtube client (over 3G) that it's not worth watching anything at all...

So there is still a huge disconnect between the data caps networks are willing to provide, and the concept of high quality video watching over 3G... good for short dogs on skateboards clips but not much else :)

On a slightly unrelated note, the built in Youtube app is working brilliantly over Wifi on the 3GS and 3G for me since updating to iOS 4 - before that I'd essentially given up on it as it was so painfully slow and buffered so much on the 3GS as to be unusable. m.youtube.com works well on wifi too - probably even better than the built in app.