yeah, that's why i asked the OP what is he trying to use. he could use one of these online extractor services that take the youtube URL and let you download an mp4, then the media player control; he could use a webview control embedded in an application, that takes the movie url directly; or he can launch safari with the youtube url from inside his app. those web utilities that give you an mp4 download are very fast, and apparently they take a constant time, about a couple of seconds, regardless of the movie size. which kinda means that the youtube movies (or most of them) are actually stored in mp4 format. maybe somebody that knows more about video than i do can explain this better.