Those are webm however which the native Video app won't play.
We will see whether we will get support for it soon, even for the early 2016 models with the old MediaTek SoC from last year. At least Sony promised that back at CES:
YouTube will also start streaming in HDR quality later this year, using a new VP9-Profile 2 codec that brings HDR support to Google’s VP9 video format. Sony’s Motoi Kawamura, Head of TV Product Planning for Sony Europe, confirmed to FlatpanelsHD that the 2016 models will support VP9-Profile 2 and be capable of streaming YouTube in HDR. We saw a demo at CES and it looked very good.
A shady url that only the Cobalt, given credentials before the start, can get into.
Since you want to argue, let's argue. What credentials? The app doesn't need any credentials to play the YouTube videos. One can sign off and the videos still show and play. But sure you miss the history, channel subscriptions and customised suggestions.
Also if with "shady URL" you mean https://youtube.com/tv, I am afraid you need to rethink it. Cobalt infrastructure or less, the app must access the YouTube HTTPD servers via APIs. For sure not via a simple "shady" URL.
And one of those API is missing in the Android TV version. The one that has the ability to choose the channel, present instead on Samsung/LG TVs, consoles, etc. Which currently is the major outcry in the YouTube Help Forums.
Then if your personal complaint is about the interface look and feel.. Good luck with that. Technically YouTube is a subsidiary company of Google. Their core business is to allow all possible platforms to watch and share their videos, not to write Android apps. Thus I imagine that to YouTube a common, unified interface just made sense. It would be fine with me as well, if it wasn't that it isn't really unified. In Android TV it keeps lacking features, and that is outrageous.
Please mate stop repeating yourself... Most of us doesn't care if this is a whole new design or just a 7 years old web view. Personally me, would be happier if they used material design straight from the phone, but they didn't. Or at least they put all the extras from it. The problem is that we don't have the same functions in this like the mobile app has.
By credentials I mean: at the first time that you open the " app" the only action asked by Cobalt, or rather, action performed is to bounce off every account that is not the one attached to the Google profile, then it loads the site...
And by "shady url" I meant the one you wrote, yes, but it is being load by the servers thru the one I wrote.
And I don't wanna argue because every Android site already reported it is a site being loaded on a Cobalt browser. Issue settled.
The underlying video player is native code which is why it supports background playback. At some point you need to access the TV's video hardware which you can't really from HTML code. The UI is a web interface. Same as with Netflix and I still can't see anything wrong with it. It does not necessarily imply bad performance. And as for design, tastes are different anyway and in world of apps where each of them imposes a different (design) philosophy I could really care less about that.
I think the app is fine design-wise, you think it is not. Let's just respect each others' opinions. I really think we should leave it at that.
I just checked. After the update it was quite a mess in terms of performances. YouTube had some 10-20% CPU usage doing nothing. Then for once I remembered to clear the whole Android cache (and I do it once in a while, just to be sure). This is what I get today with YouTube in foregroung, obviously without playing videos:
It's well known this update is nothing more than a load of old chuff, rather than wasting anymore time on this, just go to the settings - apps - YouTube and untinstall the latest update....it will roll back to the native app and life will be good again, minus the HDR of course but who cares? 4K res videos look awesome still!
You people worry to much about frankly minimal improvement, yeah HDR is ok but it doesn't come close to back in the day when we jumped from SD to HD! Now that was amazing! Pure pleasure to the eyes....to be frank, it's all a huge marketing ploy to make us all buy better tellys nothing more! chill out and enjoy the world in the highest definition possible to human kind.....through your eyes!
