Because we use flash and the iPhone/iPod don't.

Nokia and Apple went two completely different ways when designing their internet tablets. Nokia tried to build a device that could display the complete web, thus included flash. Apple tried to change the web to adapt it to their tablets, and does not want flash (1).

Before the iPhone launch, there were talks between Apple and Google about youtube (google owns youtube). Google agreed to build a second youtube, and to re-encode the videos to h.264/mp4. Apparently dailymotion did the same.

What are the results? The situation today is that there are 3 (THREE) versions of youtube (and presumably of competing sites like dailymotion):
-the flash based version you use on your desktop
-the iPhone version (h.264/mp4) (also used for iPod and Apple TV)
-a cell phone version (uses h.263/mp4 3gpp profiles)

The cell phone version has only a subset of the videos files and can be accessed on m.youtube.com. I don't know whether the iPhone version has all files. The built-in player of the N810 cannot play the cell phone videos (which is kinda strange) but should play the iPhone videos (when the resolution is not much bigger than 320x240). You should not need to install mplayer.

How does youtube (and dailymotion) select which site to present? Apparently, they use the user_agent string, but also other tricks. If we want to enjoy the iPhone version of youtube on the N810, we just need to figure that out. Unfortunately, whatever trick we figure may only work for a short time, because youtube (google) apparently is changing the access method as soon as they know that people use it. For example, it used to be possible to access the mp4 video by appending "&fmt=18" at the end of the url. This trick does not work any more. I think that the main motivation behind youtube (google) chasing people using the iPhone version is to make sure that people stream the video but cannot download it.


(1) Sidenote on Apple and Flash: Adobe already stated that they have a flash player ready for the iPhone (they said "near ready", but it is quite clear that this "near" is pretty thin). Apple will not allow distribution of it: see e.g. here (yesterday's news).

Now, before you take a stab at Apple for their closed platform, pause a second to realise what Apple policy means: Apple is using their marketing muscle to favour h.264 over flash. Why? Because h.264 is open, and flash is Adobe only. Apple does not want video playback on the Net to be tied to a single supplier (Adobe). Which is good for all alternative devices in the end, including the N810.