Roland Tanglao's Weblog

I rode in the June 2008 Vancouver Critical Mass bike ride (check out my Mobile Muse Channel with pictures, videos and text as well as my partial Nokia Sports Tracker map of the route as well as flickr pictures which I can't get into the Mobile Muse Channel since there's no RSS feed) and streamed video live using Qik from my Nokia N95, like I did for the Vancouver Car Free Festival. Only this time I didn't use WiMax just Edge

Some observations and comments:

1. The ride is quite the phenomenon. As a 3-5 days a week bicycle commuter; it was quite liberating to "take over" the streets and cycle with impunity (if you were in the middle, not so in the back) and be a 1st class citizen (for once!) on the road rather than feeling the need to maintain a constant vigil for cars not seeing you and running you over. Is this a form of civil disobedience or are we just Critical Massh*les? To be honest, I fluctuate between both.
2. Lots of people taking digital photographs and using their cellphones and taking video but nobody doing this live. Imagine 5 years from now when everything is live!
3. My Io Gear power unit Nokia N Series power connector is flakey! Aaaargh, too late to return it too.
4. The N95 really isn't designed for streaming video live over a cellphone network from a bicycle. The S60 interface is designed to be used with one hand while standing still and the phone itself is not designed to be mounted on a bicycle. I would love for Nokia to build a mobile cellphone streaming device but realistically making my own with something like the Bug from Bug Labs (hopefully I'll get mine soon) will (eventually) be the way to go

Bambuser (my archived videocasts) is another competitor to qix and flixwagon. It's out of Sweden.

Observations after a couple of 'casts:

1. Back end site is Drupal
2. You can download the flash video unlike the current versions of qix and flixwagon
3. You can select the quality and the size up to 640x480 unlike qix and flixwagon although qix supposedly will have this feature soon.
4. Does not seem to have a "stop streaming but keep uploading feature", only connect and disconnect
5. Current version seems to be slower and more jerky than the qix and flixwagon
6. It's out of Sweden

Check out my "Bambuser"-cast after the jump.

Today I tried out flixwagon, "a stream live from cellphone" competitor to Qik. I did a "Carcast" direct from my N95 (mounted on the empty passenger seat with my Gorillapod) as I drove from Gastown to the Viaduct (12 minutes). Impressive!
What Flixwagon seems better at then Qik:

1. Better buffering
2. More "Ajax-y" website

What Qik seems better at then Flixwagon:

1. Non Cheesy look and feel. I could live without the little flixwagon icon moving about before the video is shown and the "too cute" flixwagon smiley icons.
2. Higher Resolution. Qik seems to be higher resolution the flixwagon. Qik is 320x240, Flixwagon seems to be lower resolution
3. Better URLs. There seems to be no flixwagon equivalent of qik.com/roland. If it's there I couldn't find it. UPDATE: it's there! found it by URL hacking, no obvious link when logged in, my page is indeed flixwagon.com/roland
   

Anyways the proof is in the video and both Qik and Flixwagon are evolving at a rapid rate, so let the competition continue! Check out my flixwagon "CarCast":

Qik Alpha Version 0.26 appears to have solved the hanging problem when the WiFi access point is not available. Thanks Qik for the timely and very quick updates!

The current alpha (so fix it please ASAP :-) ) version of Qik hangs forever if the WiFi Access point you have configured is not available. Here's the steps to reproduce this:

1. Configure Qik to access a WiFi access point e.g. "Raincity Studios"
2. Walk out of range of the WiFi Access point
3. Start Qik
4. Voila! It hangs forever

Other than this bug, I am pretty happy with Qik. It's a great service.

ShoZu is a killer app for any phone with WiFi or unlimited mobile data and Qik is a killer app for mobile phones (I have tested on Nokia's N95-1, it supposedly will be available for non Nokia phones some day) with unlimited mobile data. Why? Because mobile data reaches almost everywhere in urban centres and you never know when you want to live stream. Qik + unlimited Mobile Data gives you the freedom to stream anywhere, WiFi doesn't. The amazing thing is that Qik is only in alpha and for an alpha is high quality. It can only get better. Unbelievably it works at 320x240 over EDGE (for short videos anyway, long videos require you to plug in or you will run out of batteries); I can't imagine how much more fun and fast it is over 3G where it works at 640x480 on the Nokia N95 and N93. See some sample videos cross posted from my RCS blog after the jump.