Hacker News Reader

Comment by experiment0 | Hacker News Reader

And it still doesn't do the one thing that I wanted it to. Namely, letting me play the video whilst the phone is locked. It's extremely silly really, that if I wanted to listen to a playlist of music, I have to keep the phone unlocked the entire time.

In the meanwhile, I'm going to continue using Jasmine. Its what the youtube app should be.

View on HN

As a software engineer, the idea of streaming video to listen to music (ignoring video output) hurts my soul. You're wasting all those bits!

In a normal world it wouldn't make much sense to allow video to keep playing while the screen is unavailable. I guess in our world, however, Youtube is one of the few reliable sorta-legal sources of free music.

Does it cost anything to display a static image? (which is what most youtube songs are)

Based on my naive understanding of compressed video, it would still send full keyframes every x frames, but the diffs between keyframes should be minimal.

I'd be less worried about that and more worried about the fact that you're using a video compression algorithm on music. That's not optimal!

We have plenty of music streaming services, Youtube seems like an odd choice.

The audio is still compressed using AAC or Vorbis at somewhere around 96-128 kbps depending on format...

Youtube has really good recommendations, doesn't need flash, and has a huge selection and existing community. Worse is better™

I'm pretty sure that the soundtrack is compressed using some conventional audio compression scheme. Usually, the audio and video are kind of separate streams, which are synchronized by the player using information provided by the container. For example, Matroska video files (*.mkv) are codec independent ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska ).

YouTube doesn't seem to be interested in becoming a streaming music service. (I suppose that's Google Music.)

I thought that Jasmine had to remove the background audio playing at YouTube's behest.

AFAIK if you double tap the home button whilst the phone is locked and then press play, it will then resume the music.

The feature they removed was the audio auto playing when you lock the phone.

EDIT: Just tested and you can indeed play music on the lock screen.

Cool. I misunderstand their changelog and never tried it myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com