Today we set my Nokia N96 down on its porno kickstand and marvel at the video options for that huge 2.8-inch screen.

First up, the groundbreaking DVB-H live television tuner…

Oh, right… Just like Japan’s 1seg and South Korea’s DMB, Digital Video Broadcast isn’t available in Canada or the US and A. It has already launched in some Asian and European markets, though — hopefully when DVB finally makes its way here the carriers will see the value in keeping it a free service.

Yeah, probably not.

Next is a mobile version of BBC’s iPlayer…

Oops, almost forgot that the old media old guard thinks it can divide up the internet into different markets as has been done in the past. We have the same problem here, but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating…

Finally, something I can watch! The YouTube feed does a passable job of filling in for the sorely-missed emTube. You can’t save videos, though, only stream them.

And (big surprise) you can’t save those 20th Century Fox film trailers to your handset, either. But to give you an idea of the quality of these things you can check out this video of my first-ever S60 handset, courtesy of the directory’s official Nokia feed. Oh, and take note of the filetype and size while you’re at it, as the N96 will only play MPEG-4 video at 320 x 240 pixels.

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…

On this, the morning of the televised leaders’ debate (the Canadian one, because I live in Canada) I present to you three viral videos I directed for the anti-Stephen Harper site AnyoneButHarper.ca — parodies of ads you may have seen on TV or on the Conservative Party web portal:

Harper on Veterans.

Harper on Family.

Harper on The Arts.

Feel free to spread these far and wide, and on October 14th vote to elect anyone but Harper!

So CBC’s Search Engine Podcast is back with a vengeance; Episode 2 of the new series is all about the very foundation of the World Wide Web — linking.

You’d think by now, some 15 years after the first web browser was made available for desktop computers, that old media would have figured out how to increase the value of their content by linking to external sites — but sadly, bewilderingly, this is not the case.

As proof may I present to you the YouTube video embedded above, Québec superstar Michel Rivard’s scathing commentary on the sad state of the arts in Canada.

The video is mentioned on at least two old media news sites, The Toronto Star (click on the embedded Canadian Press video) and The Saskatoon Star Phoenix — yet neither of them provides a link to the actual YouTube page.

Granted, TheStar.com is how I found out about the video in the first place, but it is incomprehensible to me that in this day and age a reader should have to leave either of the two sites mentioned above to find the YouTube video on their own.

Jesse Brown talks about old media’s reluctance to cite sources in the latest Search Engine Podcast. Again, that link to it is here. See how easy that was?

I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Currie… Another video from Egypt?!”

This one is actually a good lead-in for my next post… It was captured in Cairo’s famous mobile phone Souk — I was hipped to it by our tour guide in Luxor.

Note that like your typical stupid tourist I completely butchered the name of the store mentioned in the video, despite roaming on their very network with my Nokia. It is not “Eltistadt” or whatever the hell I said, but in fact Etisalat… My bad.

BTW, despite their claims of having the only 3.75G network in Egypt, I could only get 3G on my E61i.

There’s something in the air at MacWorld Expo 2008… Who cares? I’m launching a new video site!

ComedyOnHand is an online attempt at what I tried to do offline with Second Cine back in the day — to prop up the fine work of local comedians and video artists to the world at large. I’ve seen a lot of great performances and shorts posted on MyFace and the like, but as these are closed systems there is no way for the general public to see them!

So starting today, you’ll be treated to the finest in Toronto comedy hand-picked by yours truly. The inaugural video features some familiar faces from the Neutrino Video Project… Check it out right here!

If you’ve never been to a Muslim country then you’ll never have heard the call to prayer that rings out from minarets up to five times a day. Devout Muslims supposedly drop whatever they’re doing and heed the call, but Ray and I saw no evidence of this in the bustling metropolises of Giza and Cairo — or even in downtown Luxor, where this particular video was taken.

I heard my first publicly broadcast calls to prayer in Kampala, Uganda back in 2005 and find them very soothing, akin to hearing church bells in the distance. I wish I had remembered to grab another Muslim souvenir, a photo of the arrow painted on the ceiling of our hotel room in Giza, pointing in the direction of Mecca.

Okay, I know you’re all getting tired of hearing about Egypt so I’ll dump my last two videos over the weekend then get back to the tech stuff you nerds crave so much…

Despite taking place in the shadow of the Great Pyramids, greeting 2008 was a decidedly more subdued affair than rolling over into 2007 in Seoul, Korea. But I won’t forget for a second how fortunate I was to be there in the first place!

Now that you’ve suffered through my Flickr photos it’s time to marvel at the cheap 30-second videos captured by my Canon S70 — actually this one got cut off at 7 seconds for some reason, so you can watch it four times!

Your typical Giza Plateau camel tour brings you to the Pyramids from the opposite side of the front gate, Lawrence of Arabia style — that was pretty cool, but to get there Ray and I had to ride our camels through some pretty dodgy slums, and despite my free and easy grin seen here in Ray’s backward-facing photo it added about an extra half hour of travel time both ways.

Since camels have been trained to kneel they’re far easier to mount and dismount than horses. But once the beasts are at full height there are no stirrups in which to plant your feet, so if the camel breaks into a trot one’s ball sack can lift a full six inches off the saddle then coming crashing down with each step.

Thus, Ray and I took it very slow on our ride to the Pyramids and back…

Kudos to the tireless team over at IntoMobile.com for hipping me to a study commissioned by Nokia, chronicling the rise of what they call “circular entertainment”, and anticipating that within the next five years, 25% of all entertainment will be user-generated. To quote directly from Nokia’s release:

As part of the research we have identified four key driving trends: Immersive Living, Geek Culture, G Tech and Localism. These trends are currently sitting on the edge, but as these trends become more mainstream they will have a collaborative, creative effect on the way people consume entertainment and, we predict, will lead to the Circular Entertainment phenomenon.

The scope of this so-called Circular Entertainment can include anything from LOLCats to conspiracy theory documentaries like Loose Change and Zeitgeist. They don’t always have the slick production values of your typical big media product, but they don’t have to appeal to the widest possible audience, either, so they’re not nearly as bland and generic.

For every lament about the dumbening of the entertainment industry, I’m equally delighted by the rise of user-generated content. I can even foresee the day when we all become artists of some kind, even if most of us end up keeping our day jobs.

Now wouldn’t that be something…