MobileRatty: Playing Youtube movies in your Palm

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Playing Youtube movies in your Palm

2008-10-08 17:50:24 by palmdoc in The Palmdoc Chronicles

I think many Treo or Centro owners are under utilizing the multimedia potential of their devices. It’s time to show off your handheld and I’ll take you through a simple and free way to download and play Youtube movies in your Palm device.

The other day I came across this entertaining video by the Laryngospasms, a talented group of CRNAs. I thought I could show one of their clips to my anesthetic colleagues as “staff lounge entertainment”.

Now while some software like Kinoma Player can stream Youtube movies, I think a better experience is to download the Youtube movie and play the clip offline. There are only a few steps involved and I’ll show you how I do it - all for free.

1) First of all you’ll need to grab a copy of the Flash movie file. There are a number of ways to do so, but if you use the Firefox browser, you can install the Flashgot extension. When you navigate to the Youtube video and start playing it, you’ll see in your browser’s status bar in the bottom right, a Flashgot save icon, and if you click on it, it will prompt you to save the Youtube clip.

Save the file e.g. to Wakingup.flv somewhere on your hard drive

2) Now Palm does not have a native .flv (flash video format) player so you’ll have to convert it to a playable format. The free converter I use is the Riva FLV Encoder

The thing you have to change is the file extension in order to tell Riva what movie format you want it to convert to. Change the name say from Wakingup.flv to Wakingup.avi in the Destination video file box. I usually also change the movie size to 320×240 (rather than the default 640×480) since we’ll be playing the clip on a tiny PDA screen. If it is a music video, you might also want to consider increasing the audio bit rate for better audio quality. Hit the encode button and in a few minutes, it’ll be converted to a clip in the .avi format.

3) Copy the Wakingup.avi file to your Palm’s SD card. You can now play this clip in a media player which can handle the file format. In my Treo or Centro, my media player of choice is the free TCPMP Player.

There you have it. Playing those Youtube movie clips offline in your Palm in 3 easy steps