MxTube – Offline YouTube Player

MxTube started off as an iPhone web app that would give the user greater control over YouTube from their device and computer. YouTube’s primary video format is FLV (Flash Video), as their online video player is flash based. However, the iPhone and iPod Touch do not support flash videos. Therefore, Google (YouTube’s proprietor) came up with the elegant solution of distributing videos to mobile devices through the mp4 format. However, high quality mp4 encoded videos were only available to iDevices via an unpublished xml feed that requires authentication through an undocumented means. Thus, the stock YouTube application was the only method available to access decent quality videos on the iPhone or iPod Touch. However, if the user attempts to view videos via their carrier’s cellphone network, the application would default to unwatchably low quality videos. Even if the user had the option of watching high quality videos via the cell network, the wait times would be ridiculous. Whenever I’d want to show videos to my friends, I’d cope with low quality videos or long wait times, it was unbearable. This is when the idea of MxTube was born. “Save the videos to the device! Eureka! It’s so simple!”, I thought. With no prior knowledge of Objective-C or building applications for iDevices, I set out to educate myself on the subject. At the time, Apple had not yet released any information regarding a developer kit. Any native application development was performed strictly through an unauthorized means. Hackers at the time had successfully gained access to the iPhone’s file system and created documentation based on their findings. These documents along with a modified version of the GNU cross compiler allowed me to compile my apps for the device and pursue MxTube. March 4th, 2008 I finished MxTube and released it onto Installer, the App Store of unrestricted devices at the time. The opening page of the application was a news page I’d use to notify users of updates and bugs that needed fixing, etc. Within the hour of publishing the application, that very news page had crashed my home made web server with the extreme amount of traffic it was driving. Therefore, I bought hosting for that single web page, and appended a small advertisement to pay for the costs. Within the hour I had $50 and was making more money than I knew what to do with. I ported MxTube to firmwares 2.x when the iPhone 3G was released, and then 3.x for the iPhone 3GS. Over seven million downloads later, MxTube is one of the most popular applications for unrestricted devices today.