A Requiem for FriendFeed

You might not have even heard of FriendFeed before yesterday’s announcement that Facebook had bought it. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty big deal for us rockstar bloggers — if you don’t consider yourself a rockstar blogger please move along now.

Of course I’m kidding — read on and see what the all fuss is about…

Requiem for a MacBook

Last night I handed over my 2007-vintage BlackBook to my sister in law, whose IBM ThinkPad has been compromised — most probably by her kids clicking on banner ads.

Though this is the last version of Apple’s consumer portable to have FireWire (and target disk mode) built-in, it has become too cumbersome for me to cart around and has been replaced by a diminutive Asus Eee PC running Linux.

What I’ll miss:

• That it was generally a stable product, probably because I kept OS X Tiger on it and never went near Leoptard.
• (oddly enough) iSync – though not unique to this particular machine, I did store all my PIM data here. I’ve since moved on to a “cloud-based” PIM 2.0 app, but through all my trials of Nokia smartphones iSync never let me down.
  

And not so much:

• The heft – in this day and age, this thing was just too big to carry around comfortably. That fugly briefcase I had didn’t help much either.
• The glossy screen – it looked great in the store and terrible everywhere else.
• The fan – it seemed to kick in at full blast for no apparent reason and was annoyingly loud when it did.
• Paying an extra $200 CAD to get it in black. That was dumb.
  

A Requiem For emTube

Loyal readers know I’m no fan of Apple’s iPhone, mostly because its many fanboys and girls are blissfully ignorant of other smartphones and what they can do. The iPhone’s YouTube Player, in particular, is surprisingly bad when compared to the premiere YouTube app for S60, emTube.

emTube Search

Start up the emTube app and you’ll be greeted with a nice clean interface, allowing you to see the top-rated and most viewed videos on the site, or search for something more specific — in this case a little submission of my own from last summer’s iPhone launch in this country.

emTube Results

And here’s where emTube puts Apple to shame: I can view the streamed video using an available connection or I can download it to my handset for playback anywhere else. The saved file is optimized for the resolution of my handset — in the case of my E71, 320 x 240 pixels. Click here to see an archived copy, and download the associated file to see how much better it would look on my phone!

emTube Fail

But all is not well in world of emTube. The trouble started when the developer went MIA sometime last year — not a huge issue as copies of the last-known release are widely available on Nokia’s MOSH.

But now it seems our beloved YouTube app has stopped working entirely. You can still search for videos but try to view or save them and you’ll get the error message shown above. And judging from the cries for help on the Howard Forums this issue affects S60 handsets and users worldwide.

Thankfully there are alternatives, the easiest of which is to visit YouTube’s mobile portal on the built-in S60 web browser. Clicking on any of the videos will launch the on-board install of (ugh) RealPlayer, with predictably awful results. And of course there’s no way to save the video to your phone, although you can at least save a link to the specific video stream.

CorePlayer YouTube Interface

I chose instead to purchase an app called CorePlayer. At $30 USD it ain’t cheap, but it does support a wider array of video codecs, including my personal favourite.

New to the latest release is an integrated YouTube player. It took me a while to find it; this app was originally built for touchscreens, and the UI for devices without one is fairly bewildering.

CorePlayer YouTube Options

There are certainly a lot of options, though. And it’s here in the specific settings for YouTube streaming that I may have found an answer to why emTube no longer works. Choosing FLV (Flash video) or H.264 (QuickTime) as a file handling protocol yields the same error I get with emTube. Only Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) delivers the goods, so it seems that the folks at Google are the ones responsible for this mess — though why they’d want to deny a superior YouTube experience to the world’s most popular smartphone OS is beyond me.

If you’re wondering, CorePlayer’s RTSP video looks nowhere near as nice as FLV or QuickTime, but it’s at least better than RealPlayer’s ghastly solution. For now it will have to do. Rest in peace, emTube, you will be missed…