Having problems surfing the desktop version of YouTube on your mobile?If you are a frequent visitor of YouTube, you might have noticed that you can no longer enjoy the full desktop YouTube experience on your mobile device.
Editors' note (July 10):We have just been informed that YouTube has completed the workaround to support Flash 8 for the desktop version of YouTube on mobile devices. We tested it out with the Nokia N95 (8GB) and the video streams loaded without a hitch.Well, you are not alone. Support for Flash videos has been pretty disappointing all this while until Adobe's Flash Lite 3 came along. This is because the Flash Player runtimes for desktop and mobiles are not on the same level. So browsing Flash sites on your PC and on your handheld device can result in a vastly different experience. The good news is, both YouTube and Adobe are working to resolve the situation. "YouTube is currently developing a workaround that will allow users to access the desktop version on YouTube on their mobile phones using Flash 8. At this time, YouTube does not have a specific date for this to be completed", a YouTube spokesperson replied CNET Asia in an email. To Adobe's credit, Flash Lite has been around, but it's only the latest 3.1 version that supports FLV, the format that's widely used for video streaming on the Web, including YouTube. When you visit YouTube.com on your mobile device, you are automatically redirected to the mobile site, m.youtube.com. Although that works fine for the less concerned, what we want is a full desktop YouTube version. That's when things come to a grinding halt. Flash Lite 3.1 supports Flash 8 or earlier and YouTube is on Flash 9. When queried, Adobe said it is "beginning to align the Flash Player runtimes for desktop and mobile, per the Open Screen Project, which has as its main goal to unify the Adobe Flash runtime across screens including television, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics". The Open Screen Project was announced on May 1 and is supported by various industry leaders including ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless. While that looks promising, it wasn't mentioned when the unified runtime environment will be available, and we don't expect that to happen anytime soon. What's worth a second look is Adobe's announcement earlier in March that Microsoft has licensed Adobe Flash Lite plug-in for Windows Mobile Explorer. Again, it wasn't clear when the first WM handhelds will ship with this plug-in, although there may be a possibility that an updated version of Flash Lite will be available then. But that's just speculation on our part. Or, perhaps, YouTube will have completed its workaround to support Flash 8 by then. That said, not all video-steaming sites are on Flash 9, so that's a relief. For example, we could browse Metacafe which is still on Flash 8 on our Nokia N95 (8GB) without any problems. Is this a classic case of technologies not catching up with each other? Tell us what you think in Talkback.
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