How to watch YouTube on your Android phone

One of the great things about Android smartphones such as the Samsung Omnia Pro and the HTC Magic, available from Vodafone in the UK*, is that you can download, save and watch any videos on it when you are on the move.

Due to the fact that Flash web content is not viewable on Android phones, you cannot watch streamed video content on sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, iFilm, MetaCafe and more. However, you will be pleased to learn that there is a way around this problem.

vodafone-htc-magic-smartphone

Simply download a little app called Keepvid, available from keepvid.com, and you can download any video in the extensive, and constantly growing, YouTube archive.

Basically, it works like this: you browse the Youtube site for a video clip that you’d like to see, send the link to Keepvid, and they convert the video into a format that can be viewed on your Android phone and send it to you.
Here is a step by step guide to the process

1. Launch the browser from your Android phone, and press the Menu button.
2. Select Go To URL, and type youtube.com followed by the Enter key.
3. Select the video you want to download in the usual fashion.
4. Press the menu button, and select Go To URL.
5. Hold your finger on the link until the menu pops up, and select Copy.
6. Press the menu button, select Go To URL and type in http://www.keepvid.com followed by Enter
7. Press and hold the URL field on the KeepVid site until the menu comes up, and select paste. This should result in the link to your YouTube clip being shown in the text field that you have just selected.
8. Press Enter, scroll down the page, and click on the button that says Download Link for the High Quality MP4 Version of the Video.

Your video will then download onto your phone, and you can access it from your micro SD card or your browser history.

It’s important to remember that these videos do not automatically delete themselves after you have watched them. It is fairly easy to fill your micro SD card up this way, as the files can tend to be quite large, so you will have to go in and delete old files on a regular basis if you use it often, but it is a small price to pay to be able to watch YouTube on the tube.