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Apple building YouTube support into Snow Leopard

Apple will further its endorsement of YouTube and open video standards by building support for the Google-owned video sharing service into one of its flagship applications due to ship later this summer as part of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

On the heels of screen recording discoveries in the upcoming version of QuickTime X Player, people familiar with betas of the media player software say a handful of video sharing options will also be rolled into the release.

In particular, the application will let users take any supported video file and upload it directly to YouTube. Users will be prompted to enter their YouTube username and password, and QuickTime X Player will take care of the rest. This includes converting the movie into a file optimized for the video sharing service and then uploading it to the appropriate user account.

Of course, Apple will also offer a similar option for users of its own MobileMe service that will take video files and upload them to a MobileMe Gallery. Both options are reportedly accessible via a new "Share" menu in the QuickTime X Player interface.

That same menu will also see the relocation of several video saving options currently tucked away in the "Export..." dialog of QuickTime Player 7.6, such as exporting videos in formats suited for playback on iPhones, iPods, and Apple TV. In these cases, videos will be converted to their appropriate format and added to the user's iTunes library, where they'll then sync to the various media devices.

With the arrival of YouTube support in QuickTime X Player, Apple will offer built-in support for the third-party video service across all three of its core business segments. The Cupertino-based electronics maker made YouTube a staple of its iPhone experience from the onset with a custom application for browsing videos on the service and later added similar capabilities to its Apple TV set-top-box.

Google, which owns and operates the YouTube service, has been one of Apple's strongest allies in pushing adoption of open Web standards. As part of its agreement with the iPhone maker to include a YouTube application on the touch-screen handset, the search giant agreed to begin converting its vast video archive from Adobe's proprietary Flash format to the H.264 standard.


An artist's mockup the YouTube video upload dialog included in betas of QuickTime X Player

The partnership has helped strengthen Apple's argument against the need for a version of Flash capable of running on its multi-touch platform, as it wants those device to remain free of any dependence on Adobe.



87 Comments

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ivan.rnn01 16 Years · 1803 comments

this should be part of iTunes functionality... That seems logical, doesn't that? Otherwise, why no support for Dailymotion.com is planned?

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ireland 18 Years · 17436 comments

I'm waiting for the day they give YouTube a full iTunes tab, to browse, rate and download videos into iTunes from iTunes.

Oh, and I'm also waiting for them to rewrite the behemoth that is iTunes. I have one of the most powerful iMacs and I cannot even scroll through my app screen without sluggishness. Launching the app takes way too long. Considering how important this app is to Apple, and how much perfectionists they normally seems to be, iTunes at this stage is a hog.

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slapppy 16 Years · 331 comments

What happens if Silverlight from Microsoft overtakes Flash and becomes the standard on the web?

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str1f3 16 Years · 572 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by ivan.rnn01

this should be part of iTunes functionality... That seems logical, doesn't that? Otherwise, why no support for Dailymotion.com is planned?

it would be a little bit more seamless but itunes is kind of bloated already

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paxman 17 Years · 4729 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland

Oh, and I'm also waiting for them to rewrite the behemoth that is iTunes. I have one of the most powerful iMacs and I cannot even scroll through my app screen without sluggishness. Launching the app takes way too long. Considering how important this app is to Apple, and how much perfectionists they normally seems to be, iTunes at this stage is a hog.

Really? I find mine, dare I say it... quite snappy. On my most recent iMac (office) I don't have much of a library but at home it is a fair size and there I'm running an ancient g5 iMac. I guess what I consider to be a fair size library however, is to many a laughable pocket size collection of tunes.

Still, application leanness and general snappiness is always a goal worth striving towards.