Watch YouTube videos from your PS3

I have bitched a lot about the performance and usability of YouTube on the PS3. It is very very bad. It is abismal. There are two ways of watching YouTube videos from your PS3. From the normal YouTube site or from the YouTubeXL. The first choice simply does not work. The javascript on the site is very heavy for the lame PS3 browser and you cannot even click on the search button to look for something. Abandon this way altogether. The YouTubeXL service is badly implemented and it does not allow you to view all the videos on the service. Official music videos, for example, are out as the service informs you that you cannot play this video from your device (the TV). It is the same thing that happens with certain media players that have an embedded YouTube player. In addition the XL site rarely renders correctly or in full screen.

But wait, there is a third method that actually works! Thanks to a friend of allroundgeek Mac Perlinski I can now watch YouTube videos from my PS3. Mac suggested to use the www.youps3tube.com service which removes all fancy javascript stuff from the page and thus allows the crappy PS3 browser to render the page correctly. At the same time it allows all the videos to be played since it is not the XL version. The video quality from the PS3 browser is not great but I can live with that since it actually works. If you are having the same problem with me give www.youps3tube.com a try and be a happy camper.

Watch "Life in a day" on YouTube

Remember the collaborative documentary I posted about a while back?

Well it is ready and last night it screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Reactions where quite positive. The full film will be available on YouTube in a few hours so be sure to check it out. It certainly sounds very interesting.

YouTube on PS3 sucks!

YouTube on PS3 sucks donkey ass. It is as simple as that. I am a PS3 owner for more than 2 years now and from the very beginning one of the main subjects I was complaining about was that YouTube's performance on the console was abysmal. In fact abysmal cannot even begin to describe how awful watching YouTube videos on the console is. I mean, you have a big screen TV you have the most powerful console in the gaming industry and you are still unable to properly watch even the most simple of videos. HD content is out of the question...

Browsing on the PS3 browser is bad but I don't care since I do my browsing from my computer. Thus, render glitches here and there, bad controls or even slow rendering would not bother me as long as it would properly render YouTube, either the normal or the XL version of it. I will lower my expectations even more. I would not care about proper rendering of the YouTube site as long as it would playback the videos properly. It doesn't even do that.

The interface is okeyish when it renders correctly

When you load a video, the video quality is really bad. It is worse than my mobile phone. It is not only that though, it is that the video is jerky, it is that the audio and video very rarely synchronize, it is that the playback would sometimes stop even though the whole video has buffered. That happens either on the normal site or the XL site. Normal site is even worse since you cannot navigate properly, since you have to play "hide and seek" with the buttons and the cursor. The XL site is not better though, since many times when you go from full screen to normal window the site will not resize properly and will only render on half the screen.

Obviously the rendering problem is due to a bad html rendering engine of the PS3 browser. Use another engine like WebKit goddamn it. It is open and free and used by everyone with excellent results. You do not need to use the sucky engine written inhouse probably by a couple of japanese undergrad students working as interns in Sony. The playback issue is obviously a problem of the really, really, really, bad flash player of the aforementioned crappy browser. The whole of Sony cannot implement a proper flash engine? You are a multinational. Work with Adobe like everyone else if you cannot do it on your own, i don't care.

To top all that many of the videos are restricted from XL version. Music videos for example that can be viewed normally from the normal view are not even searchable from the XL version. What shoddy business takes place behind that?

As it seems this is not going to happen anytime soon on my TV screen

Such things 4+ years after the launch of the console are inexcusable, plain and simple. Supposedly PS3 is more than a gaming console. It is marketed and used as a media center as well, and not being able to use the most popular video service on the web is stupid. Low badget media servers that cost, no more than, 60-70 euros support Youtube much better. In every new update of the system I expect it to be fixed allas with no results. I think it even got worse than 2 years ago. GET IT FIXED ALREADY!!

"Life in a day"

Do you want to be a part of a documentary shot entirely by normal people around the planet? Life In A Day is your chance.

Produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald, Life In A Day is an experimental documentary. The concept is simple: the film makers are asking you to film a moment of your life on July 24th and upload it to YouTube. The best videos will be put together to create a unique perspective of everyday life around the planet.

The film will be presented on January 2011 at the Sundance Film Festival and 20 of the people whose footage is used in the film will have a chance to go to the premiere.

Find out more details here and get your cameras ready!

The vuvuzelas take over YouTube!

Yesterday there was a strange twitter update on the official YouTube twitter account. Today on most videos a new button (in the form of a football) has appeared. When pressed, this button enables you to watch any video the South African way: with the "sweet" sound of vuvuzelas in the background!

The new button

Whether this is because of the World Cup or to celebrate YouTube's win against Viacom, it seems that the vuvuzelas are slowly taking over our lives!

The horror! The horror!

YouTube for the PS3 and the Wii

YouTube announced that they will release a new service for the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii that would allow the users to use the service to view video from their TVs. For the Wii this is a first but i have been viewing YouTube videos from my PS3 since day one.

It is a, nevertheless, nice addition since YouTube surfing through the PS3 web browser was not without its problems. The flash player of the web browser, especially a couple of updates ago, is a bit slow, the interface is not optimized and the video quality is not the best. All these are going to be addressed which makes me happy cause I view lots of videos from the comfort of my couch through PS3.

XBOX360 is left out....Google(youtube owner) probably lost the Microsoft's telephone number and could not get them on the phone to create a version for them as well....

YouTube goes wide!

YouTube announced in its official blog that they are expanding the width of the video player to 960 pixels. Well, it was about time! We live in a widescreen world and this was a right move for YouTube. Cheers!

Welcome to the widescreen world YouTube!