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Posts tagged with "youtube"

Google Updates YouTube for iOS with New Music Section

Following the announcement of YouTube Music Key earlier today, Google updated its official YouTube app for iOS with a new Music tab in preparation for the service’s beta rollout next week.

The new tab, available at the top of the main interface, doesn’t bring Music Key functionalities, but instead showcases a selection of music based on popularity and your watching history on YouTube. In this section, YouTube is offering mixes (non-stop playlists based on songs or artists, like radio stations), recommended videos, a history section for music videos you’ve played before, plus trending and popular videos.

The selections in the new Music area of YouTube are solid when it comes to personal history and recommendations, but they feel a little impersonal as they lack any sort of editorial pick or curated content. The Music tab is very much user-centric at this point: music videos are either recommended based on your history and likes on YouTube or they’re already part of your subscriptions and playlists. The execution is nice thanks to large previews, a clean interface, and the ability to quickly start playing a mix or a playlist, but, right now, YouTube’s Music tab is obviously not meant to replace the home page of services like Beats Music or Spotify.

You can get the updated YouTube app with the new Music section on the App Store.

Google Announces YouTube Music Key→

Widely rumored for the past several months, Google today announced YouTube Music Key, a premium service that, starting at $7.99/month, will offer ad-free videos, the ability to keep listening to videos as music in the background, offline downloads, and access to Google Play Music (the new name for Google Play Music All Access).

From the YouTube blog:

Thanks to your music videos, remixes, covers, and more, you’ve made YouTube the biggest music service on the planet. To turn YouTube into your perfect music service, we’re launching YouTube Music Key as a beta with our biggest music fans first, and then we’ll bring YouTube Music Key to the whole world together. So, if you see an invite in your app or email, try it out for six months for free.

YouTube Music Key follows a plan to revamp YouTube’s entire music strategy with a new dedicated section:

Starting today, you’ll see a new home just for music on your YouTube app for Android, iOS and on YouTube.com that shows your favorite music videos, recommended music playlists based on what you’re into and playlists of trending music across YouTube. You can find a playlist to perfectly fit your mood, whether that’s a morning motivators playlist or Boyce Avenue YouTube Mix. Check out the newest songs from channels you subscribe to, like FKA twigs or Childish Gambino. Or quickly find the songs you’ve played over and over and over again.

The YouTube Music Key beta will start rolling out next week, and it appears that current Google Music All Access subscribers will get access to it immediately.

I’m interested in Google’s plans with YouTube because the service has what other music streaming services have always lacked: a huge catalogue of videos from artists that go beyond albums and singles. As someone who regularly watches concert videos and demo recordings on YouTube, I’m curious to see how an ad-free experience with web and iOS access could improve content that I can’t get anywhere else.

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Tuner for iPhone Turns YouTube Into A Music Player

Tuner

Tuner

Every time I go out with friends and we start talking about music, there’s always that one guy who wants to play a song and he does so…using YouTube. In spite of the relatively low barrier to entry for services like Spotify and Rdio (both available in Italy with free plans), the convenience of using YouTube as an audio source is indisputable (on top of that, add the fact that most people have a high tolerance for YouTube ads – or ads in general). Personally, I prefer a dedicated music streaming service or my iTunes Match library, but I do rely on YouTube for the occasional live performance or unreleased demo tape that I can’t obtain legally anywhere else.

Tuner is a music player for YouTube videos: with a simple search feature, it uses YouTube as an audio source, turning videos into songs you can listen to on your iPhone.

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YouTube 2.2→

The official YouTube app for iOS received an update earlier today. You can now choose the quality of videos you want to stream (tap the new icon on the video player); unfortunately, after two months, the app still isn’t built for iOS 7.

Previously, YouTube announced that an update set to be released in November will add a new feature to download videos for offline watching.

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YouTube 2.0 For iOS Released With Picture-in-Picture, Updated Design

YouTube 2.0

YouTube 2.0

Today, Google has officially launched version 2.0 of its YouTube app on the App Store, bringing a tweaked user interface, new icon, and picture-in-picture to the mobile client.

The big new feature of this version is picture-in-picture for videos, which allows you to keep watching a video while browsing or searching. This has been a popular option of third-party clients such as FoxTube for quite a while, and, in Google’s implementation, the player can be dismissed with a tap on an arrow button or a swipe down directly on the video player. Both on the iPhone and iPad, dismissing the player reveals a delightful animation and transition that quickly sends the video down to the bottom of the screen, where you can tap again to enlarge it, or swipe it away to close it.

Overall, the improved animations of the app are much snappier and responsive than version 1.4, and there are dozens of new transitions, translucency effects, and subtle interface hints that contribute to making navigation faster and fluid.

YouTube 2.0

YouTube 2.0

More importantly, YouTube 2.0 packs a tweaked design – starting from the icon – that suggests Google has been getting its iOS apps ready for the major 7.0 update coming to iOS this Fall. The app gets rid of several textures and graphical elements for a more subdued design with a focus on colors (red for selections, gray for the sidebar, whitespace for navigation and search results), transparency, gestures, and animations. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine Google going one step further with this new design and enhancing with iOS 7-only APIs such as blurs and physics effects once iOS 7 is available. The new app doesn’t mimic the look of Apple’s iOS 7 apps, but it does look like Google’s way of easing users into iOS 7’s (fast-approaching) future.

Based on my initial tests, YouTube 2.0 seems to be a powerful and welcome improvement over the old version. The picture-in-picture player is a great addition, and the app has a cleaner, more responsive interface.

YouTube 2.0 is available on the App Store.

Why I Use FoxTube

FoxTube

FoxTube

After Cody linked to FoxTube for Mac two days ago, I figured I haven’t mentioned why, after nearly a year and a major update, I’m still using FoxTube for iOS alongside the official YouTube app.

FoxTube isn’t the best looking app ever made for iOS; while the 2.0 version improved the overall design, there’s still a lot going on in terms of interface and everything feels a bit cramped, especially on the iPhone. The icon is a literal representation of the app’s name; sometimes, icons in toolbars overlap with navigation buttons. I wish the FoxTube developer could find a way to slim down the interface and make some parts more cohesive, but I understand how that can be difficult when FoxTube does so many things.

FoxTube is a supercharged YouTube client for iOS. I know what you’re thinking: you don’t need another YouTube app after the release of the (free) official client. And that is probably true – as MacStories readers know, I’m a big fan of the new YouTube app (App Store users seem to agree, too). FoxTube, however, is a great complement to the YouTube app that I recommend if you’re looking for more flexibility and customization in certain aspects of the YouTube experience. Read more

FoxTube For Mac→

Almost a year ago we highlighted FoxTube, an alternative YouTube replacement for iOS that filled in a lot of missing gaps. And even though Google’s own YouTube app (iTunes link) has replaced Apple’s and delighted many users, FoxTube is the non-Jailbroken power user’s player of choice, offering extra playback controls, media information on the lock screen, and the ability to play media in the background.

While I’m personally happy browsing YouTube on the web and using Tube Controller to integrate my Mac’s media keys, FoxTube has come to the Mac, giving anyone the power to download videos offline for later viewing, take advantage of advanced media controls, and play media through a convenient mini player. In contrast to many recent app launches for OS X, it’s even available for the latest version of Lion. FoxTube for Mac is $9.99, but you can download a free trial from the developer’s website. Due to restrictions on the App Store, I’d recommend purchasing the app from the developer to get the full set of features.

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iOS YouTube Downloader with Pythonista→

iOS YouTube Downloader with Pythonista

Useful script created by “pudquick” on the Pythonista forums:

Browse to http://m.youtube.com in Mobile Safari, view a video that you like (press Stop if it starts playing, you need to be looking at the page - not the video actually playing), then click on “Bookmarks” and select the bookmarklet that you created.

This will launch my script, which will pull the URL of the page you were looking at as an argument, parse it, figure out the direct download URL for the .mp4 video file, then open iDownloads directly to that URL to start downloading it.

As pudquick says, third-party YouTube clients with a “download” functionality are usually removed from the App Store as Google doesn’t allow downloading video files from the service. However, by using Pythonista to crawl the webpage and find the direct .mp4 link of a video, pudquick managed to put together a handy solution to go from your web browser to Pythonista and then directly to iDownloads to start downloading the .mp4 file.

However, I don’t use iDownloads – I prefer Readdle’s Documents and good.iWare’s GoodReader. Replacing iDownloads with your favorite file manager is very easy: in the penultimate line of the script, replace the iDownloads://URL with the one of the app you want to use (the URL of the .mp4 will be appended to it). Unfortunately, Documents doesn’t seem to be able to download .mp4 files in this way, but I had no problems with GoodReader. Simply use ghttp://to forward the .mp4 file to GoodReader and start downloading it automatically.

Make sure to check out pudquick’s explanation of the script and bookmarklet here. For our previous coverage of Pythonista, check out our tag page and my original review.

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Control YouTube Videos with Your Mac’s Media Keys with Tube Controller

Out of habit I tend to reach for my media keys when playing music and videos. While Rdio has certainly spoiled me with its compatibility I’ve yet to learn that the rest of the world, the web mainly, doesn’t work with the three most useful keys on my keyboard. While trying to pause YouTube videos with the play / pause key can lead to some egregious overdubs, it’s always a little frustrating when it doesn’t just work.

Enter Tube Controller, a free app from the Mac App Store for anyone running Snow Leopard and beyond. Interfacing with Chrome and Safari, Tube Controller sits in the menubar and enables your Mac’s media keys to fast forward, rewind, and pause videos on YouTube. It’s simple and convenient. You can’t hide the menubar icon, but you can tuck it away with Bartender if you’d like.

Tube Controller does a few clever things. Rewinding and fast forwarding YouTube videos is interesting because it always feels like it works perfectly. That is to say in just the right increments. It isn’t an exact amount, but Tube Controller seems rewind and fast forward in roughly 3.5-percent increments based on some quick math and plentiful watching of various length videos. Some more complicated algorithm looks at the duration of the video and slightly adjusts where needed.

The app is also aware of iTunes and what it’s doing. If it’s in the background, Tube Controller will keep eyes on YouTube, letting you play and pause the video even when you’re browsing other tabs or jumping into different apps. Once iTunes comes into the foreground or you close whatever tab your YouTube video is playing in, Tube Controller directs the media keys to control iTunes instead. Apps that implement their own media key solutions like Rdio will override the controls.

Without the Flash Player installed, I’ve found Tube Controller doesn’t work with the YouTube 5 extension I have enabled on Safari. Others, in the app’s review section and on Twitter, have noted that Tube Controller also doesn’t work in a full screen view. I’ve personally had success with Chrome and both its full screen and presentation modes, as well as YouTube’s full screen video player in that browser.

I don’t know why you would watch two YouTube videos at once, but if you do, Tube Controller handles it pretty well. The last video you viewed takes precedence over the other. It doesn’t work on web pages with embedded YouTube videos, however.

Tube Controller offers to launch when you log on and there’s a few other settings such as keeping your Mac awake while YouTube is playing (although I don’t think my Mac has ever gone to sleep while YouTube is playing) and changing the color of the menubar icon from black to red. You can enable and disable its functionality manually if you’d like.

I’m keeping Tube Controller running in the background (it uses up a measly amount of memory) for the convenience of using my media keys with YouTube. It’s certainly recommended if your play / pause reflexes are anything like mine. Download it from the Mac App Store.

Side note: The developer doesn’t have a personal site or a landing page up, but you can check out some of his other work on Bipolar (a game also available on the MAS).