YouTube on your Windows Mobile phone

It's amazing to me that smartphones sold today cannot play YouTube (and other) videos and multimedia files.  Why in the world should I be limited?  (I think the claim is that YouTube and other videos are heavy consumers of bandwidth, so the providers don't like to make it easy.)  Here is what I found to make Windows Mobile 6 work.

It's clear that this has been a problem for a while.  A search for "windows mobile YouTube" turns up all sorts of discussion and questions about the issue.  My favorite source of info on my phone the xda-developers forum has many threads on the topic.

The basic solution: install software that can play the videos because the vendors / Microsoft can't be bothered to make this work out of the box.  There are several options, but this one seems to be most common (and free):

  • Download The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP) and the Flash Video Bundle (available in many other places too). 
  • Copy the CAB's to your phone with ActiveSync (or some other mechanism).  The standard process puts them into your phone's My Documents folder.
  • Install them (by selecting from the File Explorer).  Both should be installed in the same location. 
  • Then restart your phone, and enjoy your viewing experience.

When you click on a video to view it, you will be presented with a menu to Play or Save the video or go to the page in YouTube.  Playing the video will open TCPMP and run the video. 

Thanks to the half dozen sites I visited to confirm and make sure I was getting the most up-to-date versions of these file.  For more detail and discussion, I recommend the xda-developers thread on the Flash Video Bundle.  It's also discussed at several other mobile phone forums.

1 Comment(s)

Cecily said:

Thanks for your post. With your help, our smart phones can be more powerful.

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This entry was published on August 12, 2008 11:09 AM and has 1 comment(s).

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