Photos: YouTube on your TV
As part of an ongoing series, we took a look at the YouTube widget, available on Yahoo Widget-enabled Samsung HDTVs.
YouTube for Yahoo TV Widgets
We spent some time with the YouTube widget for Samsung HDTVs as part of our updated look at the Yahoo TV Widgets platform.
The "snippet," or collapsed form of the widget as it appears on the dock, only serves to launch the program. The Yahoo Video widget, pictured here in snippet form, allows users to scroll through the snippet for video categories, in this case "Movies," that have been marked as favorites.
Main window of the widget
Full-screen YouTube widget
YouTube widget search feature
One truly unique feature, a live-updated search, is really impressive, at first, as it provides a search service similar to OS X's Spotlight. After you input each letter using a virtual keyboard on the left side of the screen, the right side is populated with a list, complete with thumbnail previews, ratings and descriptions, of matching videos.
As seen in this picture, the search is neither suggestive nor predictive. When we tried searching for videos of Coldplay, we didn't get any relative content until we had typed "Coldp," and even then these were mostly fan-made cover songs and low-view videos.
YouTube widget search feature, cont'd
Search results
Widget video player
The actual video player is available in window form and full-screen, which, like other YouTube clients for TV, stretches out a video regardless of display ratio to fill the 16:9 screen. It also automatically plays the next related video, which is particularly useful when watching multi-part videos.
While video quality was about the same as other YouTube clients we looked at, the widget did lack a number of key features available on other TVs.