YouTube should just work.

[sj]

YouTube is one of the most popular sources of learning material in the world. It is massively localized. It needs to work out of the box.

After discussion with CJB, here are a few things we can do to make this happen.

1) get YouTube to produce an openvideo portal like openvideo.dailymotion.com, which all XOs (1 and 1.5 alike) can view. This means advocating with YouTube leads and through our board-level contacts. They wouldn't have to switch over their entire library; but the most popular 1% of videos and 100% of education videos would be a fine start.

2) find a way to get codec rights for mpeg. This is a much broader and superior solution to 1) for the 1.5 XOs, since it would let us use the hardware decoding on the via chip (faster, lower power) and would work for sites other than YouTube. This means talking to Quanta, Via, and perhaps MPEG LA.

3) if none of the above works, find a way to ship Adobe Flash with associated codec rights. this is a far inferior solution, but Adobe has already indicated a willingness to help make this happen.

[mikus]

I'm not sure of the intent of #9500.

My concern is that on XO-1.5 os32, YouTube did *not* work "well enough". [I'm using the latest plugin from Adobe.]

I tried looking at YouTube with four browsers. Opera was the best - one could see visual hesitations (i.e., frame drops) in "lots of motion" scenes - but both the video and the audio could be followed (if sometimes "jerky"). Browse (Sugar) was next - though not as "smooth" as Opera. Midori was a distant third. [I was surprised - I expected Midori to do better.] Firefox (latest version) was almost unwatchable (incomplete frames, significant pauses) - perhaps because its canvas greatly exceeded the XO-1.5 screen size.

I notice that when playing movies with Mplayer, the XO-1.5 (build os32) is significantly LESS capable (must have small canvas to avoid jerkiness) than the XO-1 (build 801) was.

I agreee that "YouTube should just work". But in mid-Oct 2009 the XO-1.5 ability to present YouTube videos is not there yet.

[mikus]

I'm waiting for the xv driver to work on the XO-1.5.

In the meantime, I was not impressed with my first attempt to use google-chrome to view YouTube on the existing XO-1.5 software. But on trying google-chrome again, this time with the extension that lets some YouTube streams look to chrome like HTML5 streams, there was a gain in "smoothness".