How can iPhone stream Youtube Videos without Flash?

We all know that our favourite Apple doesn't support Flash and as few technologists predict, will never support Flash natively in iPhone/iPod Touch for some strategic, technical and practical reasons. This clearly meant that all the online flv videos of Youtube, the most popular online Video Sharing site, would never run in iPhone. If that was the case, I would never buy an iPhone. Its practically impossible to imagine a rich internet browsing experience without Youtube!

How can iPhone play Youtube Videos?

But now that we've seen iPhone playing Youtube videos, its a general question, how can this be possible? Has Apple allowed Flash only for the Youtube videos?

The answer is NO. iPhone supports H.264 video compression standard. H.264 is an equivalent to MPEG-4 part 10 or MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding). YouTube has encoded the plethora of videos available in the site and iPhone can play that format. The audio encoding is in AAC.

Some facts to interest you:

• The compression is more in EDGE network than in the WiFi network. The reason is very obvious.
• iPhone is the first handheld/smart phone to support H.264 video encoding.
• Apple and Adobe are "supposedly" working very hard to make Flash available in iPhone. Until now, no significant development is observed.
• There was a rumour that Flash Lite 2+ would be supported in iPhone. Almost all big players in smartphone industry like Palm Pre, Windows Mobile, Symbian etc supports Flash Lite (some even support Flash Full version) but not Apple iPhone.

Shantanu Narayen, the CEO probably has itched the modified version of this famous statement by Martin Luther King Jr. in Adobe's lobby, "I have a Dream that one day, my kids and his (Steve Jobs) kids would be playing multiplayer Flash Games in their iPhones without knowing the pain that we had to undergo, I HAVE A DREAM"