Huge MobiTubia Preview

As the first of its sort at the time of “MobiTubia’s” announcement, it was presented as Flash Lite supporting standalone player being able to play EVERY file from the popular video site “YouTube”. 25 000 lines of code were needed to add the feature of Flash Video playback to S60 phones.
Celebrated as a real revolution in mobile video playback on N-Series phones, it won the Grand Prize of the “Open C Challenge”, contaminated with 10 000 dollars.

“MobiTubia” is developed by Sittiphol Phanvilai, a student in master of Engineering Program in Computer at the Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.

I already told you, that I had the honour to be a beta tester of “MobiTubia”. Sittiphol is providing his applications only to bloggers at the moment, so it isn’t accessable for public.

In this post, I want to show you why “MobiTubia” is such an amazing application and you can really count the days till its release.
Sittiphol is always in the process of improving and adding features to “MobiTubia”, so that things could have already been added while you are reading this preview. I was using version 1.68 Build 3 for this article.

Main Menu:

Just after launching “MobiTubia” and skipping the screen displaying its icon, one of the application’s best features jumps into the eye: the great design.
The icons are ordered into a very nice looking circle. Smoothly animated, they turn around like a carousel, when you change to another menu point. This kind is also used by the “Video Centre” application of newer N-Series phones. But of course “MobiTubia” looks much better: the icons are designed so lovely and the animations are simply great, especially in comparison with Nokia’s video application.

Furthermore, the nice background picture contributes to the impressive opctis. As you can see in the screenshot, your current theme is completely ignored. Just in case of entering something and toolbars are displayed, your theme comes to light again (you will see that later).

“MobiTubia” is a “landscape mode-only” application. The screen is rotated automatically when you launch it. Only when you must enter search terms or internet addresses, the screen is displayed in portrait mode.

Now I will show you the certain menu points and its great designed icons:

YouTube.com

The first icon showing the “YouTube” logo leads directly too a large submenu with options just designed for the world’s most famous video portal. It’s amazing which solutions Sittiphol found to make it as easy as possible to manage these amount of videos. Read on, I will explain this menu point below.

Open Clip URL

Changing one icon to the right, you arrive at the “Open Clip URL” menu point.

You actually won’t use this menu point very often, because it is used to play videos from an address linking directly to a “*.flv” file.

Most of the internet sites embed their videos into a web page, so that you can not access it this way.

But anyway, if you found a video’s address ending on”*.flv”, you can use this menu point to play it. Sittiphol shows his will to make the control of “MobiTubia” very easy:

The constant beginning of a normal address is already entered, as well as the necessary file ending. So you just have to move the cursor between “http://www.” and “.flv” to enter the individual part of your video’s address.

Saved Clips

“MobiTubia” has the great feature to save videos on your phone’s memory or memory card if one is pleasing you. The nerving converting process to show your friends your favourite video on your mobile phone can be dropped.

All saved videos are stored here, no matter whether they are from YouTube or a different page.

I made an extra point about the action of saving videos below.

About

I was a little bit surprised about Sittiphol addicting the “About” page an own icon in the main menu, because most applications have it stored in the “Options” menu.

But actually it is more an informing page:

Sittiphol wrote down the definition of his application and other information like which files are supported.

Apart from that, the normal things like contact info are displayed here.

Exit

And last but not least the “Exit” icon. It is not as professional designed as the other ones in my opinion, maybe because it is hard to exit such a great application?

YouTube Submenu

YouTube has got an own submenu in “MobiTubia”.

It is ordered into the categories “Recently Featured”, “Popular Clips”, “Clip Search”, “Open Web Clip” and “View by YouTube ID”.

The icons are great designed again, really good work of Sittiphol.

Now I will explain you the certain categories a little bit more:

Recently Featured

Members of the world’s largest video portal are able to rate videos they like.

“MobiTubia” loads the list of the “Recently Featured” videos directly from YouTube and displays them.

First the access point must be chosen. WiFi is of course the most powerful connection, so I am using my Fritz!Box connection.

For the first time, you can see the great video overview of “MobiTubia. It is designed amazingly, same as the menus. Always three video are displyed on the screen with a nice preview picture and the title above it.The selected one is elevated with a little larger picture and its title displayed at the screen’s bottom.

Popular Clips

The menu point “Popular Clips” shows the videos uploaded on YouTube with the highest traffic.

The list is like the “Recently Featured” videos downloaded at the time of its access and not buffered for some time.
You have the choice between the most popular videos of the “Day”, “Week”, “Month” and even a larger time period.

The clip overview is the same as in the whole application. Always 25 videos are displayed on one page.

Clip Search

And now we arrived at the menu point which you will use most: “Clip Search”. Self-explanatory, this is the menu point for videos you want to find by entering search terms.

After selecting it, the display rotates to portrait mode. The developer added this feature knowingly to facilitate typing.

The searched videos are displayed as usual, and my “Nokmote” video on place 3.

Open Web Clip

“Open Web Clip” is also a nice idea of Sittiphol.

You enter the address of a website containing YouTube videos. “MobiTubia” browses automatically through the available videos…

… and displays them. Because of the UI of “MobiTubia”, one single video is displayed multiple times. This will be fixed in the next version.

View by YouTube ID

And last but not least another nice solution to view a video:

The address of a video from YouTube has always the same syntax: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xB1UJWjzWI

The number / letter combination after “watch?v=” is called the “YouTube ID”.

“MobiTubia” supports also searching videos by entering the ID. In this case, it is a combination with 11 letters and numbers I am entering.

The video is played immediately after confirming.

Video Playback

First “MobiTubia” is initializing…

… and connecting to the video. And then we come directly to the…

Video Interface

MobiTubia is built up very logically. In contrast to the menus, the interface, when playing a video, is kept simple and that’s how it should be.

1. At the top on the right, the fraction of the already loaded video is displayed and also the video’s size.

2. At the bottom on the right, the time of the whole video and the video’s current point of time is displayed.

3. The little symbol with the number shows the current volume. You can turn up the volume with the “Up” key and lower it with the “Down” key. There are 10 different levels, “0″ silences the application.

4. The bar at the bottom on the left is the time bar. The already played part is displayed in a brighter colour than the rest.

You can forward and reward the video with the direction keys.

5. A video is paused by pressing the “Middle” key, “Paused” is displayed in the display’s middle then.

A real fullscreen mode is still missing, the bars can’t be blinded out. Sittiphol has already promised me to add this in the next version.

I think you are all interested in the video playback quality. Well, it is very good when a video is completed, but is always lagging when data still must be loaded.
Sittiphol is aware of this problem and is working hard to improve it. I have no doubt he will make it to remove it completely, because he has already improved it a lot from beta version to beta version I received.

However, there aren’t any asynchronity problems between audio and video like in “emTube” and that’s a very positive thing so far.

After a video has been played, you can “Replay” or also save it.

Save Clips

As I wrote ahead, ”MobiTubia” has of course also the function to save videos. The “Save Video” option is available at the point of time, when a video is loaded 100% in the “Options” menu.

You can choose between saving the video to “Phone Memory” or “Memory Card”.

The video is saved on the chosen data type after a little time.

The main menu point “Saved Clips” leads to the overview of all saved videos where they can be played. Saved clips are stored into “C:\Data\Videos\MobiTubia\YT\”.

After they have been saved, files can be renamed by using “Options” -> “Rename”.

A nice idea is, that the application notices when a video, which is already saved, shall be played. A pop-up menu appears where you can confirm playing the saved file, so you there is no need to wait for the video being loaded.

Settings

That’s the point at which Sittiphol still must work hardly. There are only a few settings:

You can set the “Cache Drive”, what means setting the directory where the temporary downloaded videos and thumbnails are stored.

Also you can set how many Frames are approximately skipped when you are playing a video. “3″ is the default setting.

Well, that’s it, no sorting or personalisation options. But I am sure there will be enough settings in the final version matching to the rest of “MobiTubia’s” great overall impression.

Features being added in Final Version:

• -Support for other video portals
• -Fullscreen Mode
• -Settings
• -Lag-free Video Playback
• -And a lot more…

Conclusion

I am a huge fan of Sittiphol’s work, “MobiTubia” is amazing. Most of all the UI is so great.
Sure it has disadvantages like video lagging and little options, but the knowledge that the developer is aware of all problems and has plans to release “MobiTubia” as a perfect creation with the support for other video portals, makes me being sure that “MobiTubia” will be the best application being able to play Flash videos.