There is a NEW version of the Iris Browser and it is pretty good.  I have been using it on my Palm 750 and find the experience to be pretty stable.  It still needs more work

UPDATE (08/01/2007): outdated. See THIS instead.
(end of update; original article follows.)

Anyone into watching YouTube videos knows it has always been pretty problematic to play YouTube videos on Windows Mobile. This has also been explained in my related article Playing Flash Video (FLV) files on the Pocket PC - is it possible?.

The built-in PIE / IEM, because of the very bad JavaScript support, has always been unable to play them back and it was only lately that Opera Mobile (as of the first beta of 8.65) and NetFront (as of TP 3.4 007 released early June, 2007) received YouTube support.

These solutions are really sub-par, particularly that of NetFront, which has a comparatively slow Flash plug-in.

This means, so far, the best way to watch YouTube videos was relying on external, Web-based convertor services listed in my earlier all-in-one article on playing back YouTube videos. These convertor services, unfortunately, need a lot of additional work and, in general, result in files that are (much) larger and/or of (much) lower quality than the original YouTube videos.

TCPMP Plugin for Flash Video on PPC for the rescue! It provides a VERY fast (MUCH faster than even Opera Mobile’s playback, let alone the far inferior YouTube support in the latest NetFront beta) and, what is more, conversion-less (meaning no additional bandwidth / quality loss because of the conversion) solution. What is more, it’s FREE, as is TCPMP itself, and runs on both Pocket PC’s and, with some restrictions, touch screen-less Smartphones.

In the following, I explain how it should be used.

There are many standalone Flash players for the Pocket PC. Standalone stands for the ability to play “offline” .swf (Flash) file right on the PDA. I’ve reviewed all the previously available Flash players in my well-known Playing Flash Content on the Pocket PC roundup.

Now, a brand new and, what is more important, free (as opposed to the previously available, commercial standalone players) Flash player has been released. It has promising and useful features – and, unfortunately, a very bad bug: the complete lack of the D-pad support.

Availability

The home page of the application is here; direct CAB download link here. Note that the website may be offline; when I started writing this article, it was online; when I finished it, it was offline. Also accessible at Handango.

I always receive questions regarding whether it’s possible to play Adobe/Macromedia Flash Video (FLV) files on the Pocket PC. Therefore, I’ve investigated the question of playing these files.

What are Flash videos?

To put it simply, there are two kinds of Flash-based videos: traditional Flash videos (also having the .swf extension) and enhanced videos having the .flv extension.

Today, I’ve worked hard, in addition to the nominations/recategorization of the Pocket PC Mag Best Software Awards 2006, on the new Bible of Pocket PC Browsers (the (still) current version can be found linked from this blog post).

After noticing NetFront uses the full CPU capacity with a lot of Web pages, I’ve done some extensive tests. During this, NetFront turned out to be pretty buggy in the Macromedia (Adobe) Flash department. This, unfortunately, also applies to the latest, 3.3 version (the full, commercial version available still only in Japanese – therefore, I’ve tested this on the Japanese version; the English version will be the same in this respect), not only on the previous one, 3.2.

What does this all mean?

If there is a Flash animation on a Web page, NetFront will consume almost all CPU cycles to render the animation. This will result in a tremendous slowdown of the entire Pocket PC and very high battery usage. The CPU usage is very high even with the simplest, most innocent-looking Flash animations!

Unfortunately, this will also happen when the animation(s) isn’t (aren’t) visible or NetFront is hidden (because you’ve switched to another program). Also, the same problem applies if any Flash animation runs in another tab (if you are browsing another window.)

http://www.smartphonemag.com/blogs/menneisyys/052006FlashPlayers.asp

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=402005

http://www.smartphonemag.com/blogs/menneisyys/052006FlashPlayers.asp

http://www.smartphonemag.com/blogs/menneisyys/052006FlashPlayers.asp