Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Flickr finally added video today.Yay! Only 90 seconds and 150MB per video (and requires a pro account to upload videos) but you can tag, geo-tag, add videos to sets and use the flickr privacy system (and there will be a video upload API, yes!). Other than taking videos at conferences and events like DemoCamp and Mobile Monday, I really use video for family stuff which is on my private family flickr account (for those of you who care about my public flickr account, don't worry, i will soon have many videos of me bicycling through Vancouver :-)  to join my 36000 and counting photos!). So having flickr support video will be a great way to share videos via flickr's guess pass to my non-flickr-using family. Now if only you had access to the original video, flickr video would be complete! Feature request to the ShoZu folks: support upload to flickr once the API comes out and support the full 150MB over 3G and WiFi!

Simply right-click on any flash movie in ustream.tv (e.g. the one on the home page of ustream.tv) and set the microphone and camera to  your iSight or whatever you want and done. My guess is that sometimes the Adobe Flash camera recording applet has messed up default settings. Thanks for the excellent support, Chris!

From email from Chris Yeh, ustream investor of some sort:

QUOTE 

Got my ustream.tv webcast to work with my Canon DV camera over Firewire. Here is my 'cast: Roland's Mundane TV. It wouldn't work with my iSight with my Power PC Powerbook G4. Strange but true :-) ! Guess the ustream.tv crew only tested with intel Macs!

I can't get ustream.tv to stream video with my Power PC Powerbook G4 and iSight. I know it works with MacBook Pros (because atmasphere got it to work). Any clues or workarounds would be appreciated. I have tried Firefox 2 and Safari. Email roland AT rolandtanglao.com or leave a comment.

The KRZR K1 video is decent CIF quality but it's two year old techology. The Nokia N70 videos were just as good quality back in 2005.

Check it out and judge for yourself:

KRZR K1 video of the Skyte (blip.tv bug, I rotated the original but the flash video below is not rotated: original KRZR K1 Skyte 3GP Video with correct orientation)

Click To Play

Compare and contrast with Richard's Nokia N70 video of the Skyte

All open source Lulop's video transcoding of my Drupal 5 logo screen cast is also very legible (see my earlier flash video encoding shootout) . Go open source go!

video.ca's flash video transcoding of my Drupal 5 logo screencast (see below!) seems pretty legible too. Again as per my previous brightcove versus blip.tv versus google video versus YouTube informal shootout, I can't use video.ca as my default video service because there's no Creative Commons licensing option. Yes, I am pretty dogmatic about that. I believe in creating a digital commons which is not of concern (alas :-) ! ) to most people.

In a completely unscientific test, I took this original MPEG-4 video from a Drupal 5 screencast I made using Snapz Pro X and then uploaded it to blip.tv, Google Video, YouTube and Brightcove Consumer.

In the original MPEG-4 you can clearly make out the text. Only Brightcove's transcoded flash video has legible text. In the others, the text is very blurry and almost unreadable. I don't know anything about transcoding but could the fact that Brightcove transcodes to a slightly bigger size explain the fact that its text is not as blurry as the others?

Does this mean I'll switch to Brightcove Consumer for all my video? No! Why? Because I need the Creative Commons licensing and original file options that blip.tv gives me. And if anybody can improve their transcoding, blip.tv can!

See for yourself after the jump if you don't believe me!

blip.tv:

Click To Play

Google Video:

YouTube:

Brightcove Consumer:

I just tried to upload the 148MB MPEG-4 video taken with my Nokia N93 from yesterday's Vancouver League of Drupalers meeting and it failed with this error: "Problem getting information from upload form. " I guess there's a limit? Say 50MB or 100MB? (which is typical and reasonable; AFAIK only Google videos allows over 100MB videos in my experience).

I tried to do the right thing and read the docs but none of the links work. i.e. guidelines, terms of use, faq and forum

All are 404 except faq which displays the questions but no answers in Firefox 2 on Mac.

It would be great to see a follow-up post about this because it'll be a very cool thing to have working!

FROM Getting Mobile Movies Onto Your Phone:

QUOTE

Pocketcine provides a way for you to transfer data from your computer to your phone (or potentially other people's phones) using WAP. Our Phone Uploader service is free, although you will incur data charges with your carrier. We downloaded a 500kb movie to our phone for $0.15 cents. You send the image, sound, application (midlet) or video to our server and then use your phone's browser to download the media file to your phone.

Click here to use the service now.

Jim Udall actually used part of the code we have on our site to build his mobile services platform. What is particularly useful about Jim's software is that it will query the phone requesting a file to download and transcode the video in the right size and format. He has also developed code that allows you to put a button on your website, making the whole process of downloading to the phone much faster and simpler. Unfortunately the service is not yet available on a commercial basis.

END QUOTE

Although I was initially a skeptic about the WebKit based web browser for S60, I am now a believer :-) since I can upload videos directly from my phone over WiFi to blip.tv

Who needs a desktop or laptop computer when you can upload videos over WiFi to services like the most awesome blip.tv? Well I do until I have decent text entry on the N93 or whatever video phone I happen to be using (and for now I guess that means a QWERTY keyboard of some sort although I am willing to bet there's lots of room for creativity here!)

All I can say is Go Web Browser for S60 go! And of course go blip.tv go!

Here's the proof:

And here's the video:

Click To Play