personal video

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:

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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)

Not bad CIF quality. Not great either. About as good as the N70 which is now 2 years old. Not nearly as good as an Nokia N93

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.

Uploading a Logo to the Drupal 5 Garland Theme on Video.ca

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:

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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.

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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:

Lovely Christmas carol singing (Have yourself a Merry Christmas) from Afterglow (604-461-1409, afterglowquartet AT gmail.com) uploaded directly from my N93 over WiFi using the browser for Series 60.

Add MyFabrik to the list of services that can't handle N93 MPEG 4 files. Check out my N93 video on http://www.myfabrik.com/roland/public/roland If you can get it to play, love to hear it! On Mac Firefox 2.0, if I click on "Video" and then the play button at the top right, nothing happens. Back to blip.tv for me!

Using the Mac OS X Google Video Uploader, I tried to upload a 31 minute 691 MB MPEG4 640x480 30fps video I took with my N93 of today's 1st session of Drupal Training held by Bryght and Raincitystudios and Google claims the video uploaded but I don't see it anywhere in my uploaded video list. Very frustrating!

Is there a way to turn the N93 screen so that I can see myself while shooting a 640x480 30fps movie? There doesn't seem to be which is a major disappointment since I planned on doing lots of "me as talking head" full resolution videos. I can turn the screen and look at myself while filming but then it uses the secondary camera which films at CIF resolution. Please fix in the post version 20 N93 firmware update (N93 Firmware version 20.0.58 doesn't appear to have it).

The N93 Video is impressive but it takes a lot space. 100MB for 5 minutes. So, it's quite the chain of pain to get the video and share it (yeah I know you could compress it but that takes too much time!) since most sharing services e.g.blip.tv and revver only accept 100MB videos. My 5 minute video above of the Skyte is well over 100MB. Luckily, Google Video has no limit (but the average non techie non geek person is not going to go through the hoops that I went through to post on Google Video; they'll want something easier like YouTube; now that Google owns YouTube perhaps the limits will be raised!).

Nokia needs to address this in future video phones probably by running a companion web service (or partnering with one) and also doing more compression in hardware.

UPDATE:It looks like blip.tv took the FLV that the Brightcove Publishpod encoded out of my MP4 (if the video below doesn't work, go to my blip.tv post to play it!):

Click To Play

The first video I did with my N93 was a 5 minute one of the SkyTrain (of course!). It's an awesome video but its 100MB (since I did it at 640x480 30fps MPEG4). I tried to upload it to Brightcove (since I know it won't work on blip.tv, my fav service; file is too big) but it didn't work. The Brightcove Mac OS X uploader, Brightcove Publishpod, successfully encoded the MP4 to flash video aka FLV but the sites says it's processing (and it's been saying that for 24 hours!).

I guess I'll try Google Video. I did search the Brightcove knowledge base and FAQs but found no documentation for video file upload limits or that MPEG4 (and yes I know there are many variants of MPEG4 and perhaps Nokia's is not supported) was not supported. Ah well early days. Brightcove sounds great (Robin Good's Brightcove review makes it sound wonderful) but I couldn't get it to work.

I want one. LazyWeb: hack this to work with S3 and Drupal and I'm in . This would be a great hack for BarCamp Vancouver.

FROM How to create your own YouTube site - Flash Insider:

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Have you ever wanted to know how you can create your own video hosting site allowing users to upload video, automatically convert it to FLV, and display it for the world to see? A recent post at Daniel's Random Mutterings (DRM - how clever) explains exactly how to do this with open source tools. Using a Djano CMS system, FFMpeg for the FLV encoding, FLVtools2 for writing meta information, and FlowPlayer for embedding the SWF file you'll have everything you need to get started. The code is pretty straight forward and a great starting point. Now go forth and create your new video distribution empire.

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YouTube Mobile Uploading doesn't work in Canada, *sigh*. Well at least it doesn't work with Fido (in my experiments anyway. I'd love to be proven wrong) since Fido MMS can only handle 300K and most videos are at least 1MB.

Supporting MMS is ridiculous, YouTube! Nobody uses MMS in North America (well at least no adults, youths and crazy Web 2.0 people that I know). Please support video upload using email like the fantastic blip.tv does!

FROM TechCrunch » YouTube Mobile Uploading:

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YouTube announced a new feature today that allows uploading of videos from a mobile device that supports Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). Users need to create a moblie profile before uploading videos. Sign up here.

I use my camera phone to upload pictures directly to Flickr all the time (yesterday’s banana-yellow ridiculous rental car, for example). If my phone had the ability to create video, I’d be using this for YouTube all the time, too.

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[Cross posted from MoMo Van]

Mobile Monday Vancouver May 2006 last night at Take 5 was an eclectic potpourri of topics and very lively conversation. Here are my highlights:

Matthew Snyder of Nokia is a former big wig of Nokia Search but has now moved on to other cool projects in Nokia. His current job is in Helsinki but he's based in Vancouver! Talk about a commute. He was a lively and fascinating conversationalist. Matthew demoed the Nokia/Yahoo Search app on his N70 together with some cool Canadian local integration which has not yet been released but I can't wait until it does. And I hope Matthew will start blogging!

Jim Pick showed off his 2 (!) Nokia 770s that he picked up when he was living in Berkley. The 770 is an awesome WiFi mini tablet (would be better if Gizmo and Skype were bundled!). I really wish it was sold in Canada. Anyways Jim who recently moved back to Vancouver has worked on the ARM port of Linux, Xen Virtualization and the Kaffe Java virtual machine. Jim's a great addition to the mobile community. Welcome back Jim!

Carlo of Upside Wireless discussed their SMS related work with the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale and plans for the IPIPI SMS engine

Duff Gardner of New Media BC's Mobile Muse project gave us the skinny about the upcoming mobile related talks at Vidfest (I wish there was a schedule for Vidfest 2006 that I could link to, but until then here's the Vidfest 2006 Speaker list) as well as some insight into the new World Centre for Digital Entertainment that New Media BC is working on.

Patrick Payne, ex of Mobile Operandi/Mophone/3GUPLOAD and Ericsson, was also a lively conversationalist. He spoke about the Wireless lab that will be part of the World Centre and the plans for taking MoMoVan to the next level after learning from the mother ship at the Mobile Monday Global Summit May 8th and May 9th, 2006 in Helsinki, Finland.

Speaking of the MoMo Summit, Steph Rieger (who along with Bryan has done 99% of the MoMoVan organizing, I just pontificate and blog :-) !) will be there with Patrick and is also hoping to learn from the MoMo Mothership. She and Bryan also discussed Flash Lite as well their ideas for a Bluetooth server.

I of course pontificated about the greatness of ShoZu (my ShoZu pics and videos) the N70 Nokia Blogger Relations program and how I was saving for my own N93 dream phone (3x optical zoom, 30fps video!)

John Goodall of LiteFeeds (a cool mobile RSS reader) made a brief appearance and then mysteriously left (work or family called I bet). Come back John!

Finally, we spent a long time discussing the next MoMoVan which will be Monday June 5th at a venue to be determined and what the next phase of MoMoVan looks like. If you are interested in helping shape and influence Mobile Monday Vancouver, it's never too late. Sign up for the Yahoo Grooup MoMoVan group and get your skin in the game! Looking for organizers, speakers, and sponsors! Looking forward to hearing from you!

See you in June!

Actually, Ethan, "MySpace Killer" is not the new black it's the new "Flickr of..." :-) ! Remember the good 'ole days last year when everything was the flickr of something? e.g. the flickr of video (which still doesn't exist IMHO) !

From TechCrunch » AOL To Launch “Myspace Killer”.:

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TechCrunch » AOL To Launch “Myspace Killer” being a myspace killer is the new black it seems.

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