A couple of years ago there was a light flurry of YouTube clients for S60 phones. The official YouTube app, of course plus other chancers like YTPlayer, vTap and - our favourite of the bunch - emTube. emTube was a very capable player that could also download YouTube movies for offline viewing and was an early adopter of Nokia's accelerometer support to allow iPhone-style autorotation of videos. What's that got to do with Open Video Hub you might ask? Well, join us aftre the jump and you'll find out...
emTube had some problems last year due to a change in the way YouTube published videos and development went a bit quiet for a while, but now it is back under its new name of Open Video Hub. Its not the snappiest of names, but it does reflect both the open source code behind the project and the app's support for several other video sites. So, how does the new and improved app measure up?
Open Video Hub is designed to make finding and watching videos easier. If you use a Nokia, you'll know that the standard browser just isn't up to watching only flash moves. You could try an alternative browser like Skyfire but unless you are following links to movies your best bet is going to be a client app like Open Video Hub (OVH from here on in). Unlike emTube, OVH supports several video sites. DailyMotion and Metacafe are included by default, but there is a SDK to create plugins for other sites. All the sites can be searched, but OVH expects you to pick a default to check first - for most users this will probably be YouTube, of course.
The user interface is a mixed bag. The actual video playing part is pretty good (although while the onscreen controls are very easy to use you have to wait a couple of seconds for them to disappear and can't simple tap to remove them) the menus are horrible looking, with rather garish multicoloured icons. A bit of time spent tidying up these screens would have made for a more streamlined experience.
You can quickly see new or recommended videos, and searching for videos is very easy. You just type in keywords and let the app go and fetch some clips. If you don't see what you want on (say) YouTube, just tap to repeat the search on Metacafe, etc. regardless of what site is hosting your video you will get to view it through a consistent interface, which makes the search process fairly seamless.
Playback performance was great and OVH handled buffering and high-res videos well. You can zoom in and out of videos while playing (with a smooth zooming animation - nice touch) and skip back and forth using the onscreen controls.
Unfortunately, although there is an option for 'saved videos' the ability to download video for offline use seems to be missing in action. Hopefully this is just a temporary glitch as this was one of the better features of emTube.
Open Video Hub is a great video client and one that makes searching for video clips online a quick and enjoyable process. We'd like to see a bit more development to add missing features and tidy up some rough edges, but this is still worth your time and a bit of space on your memory card.
Details
Price: Free
Size: 0.654 MB (S60 3rd Edition) 0.401 MB (S60 5th Edition)
