streaming

Got my phone bill last month and it's my highest bandwidth usage ever. 875MB primarily because I streamed 640x480 video using Qik on the E75. Just goes to show you that as I have suspected, once you start streaming at 640x480 or higher e.g. HD, your mobile bandwidth is going to start rapidly rising and suddenly having a multi-gigabyte data plan makes sense!

In other words once Apple catches up :-)  with Nokia in terms of being able to stream 640x480 or higher resolution video over 3G, 3.5 G or 4G, it's going to bring the mobile network to its knees (at least the Canadian mobile networks and probably most other North American ones which are not designed for mass market video streaming)!

Here's my Northern Voice 2009 presentation (PDF) about Mobile Video Streaming circa 2009:

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.

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

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
   

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.

The above photo shows my "bicyclecast" setup (Gorillapod + N95 + DT-22 Tripod Adapter + my bicycle). It worked for only 6 minutes of my 30 minute commute to work (bug? limited buffering capacity? EDGE too slow?). And was fun. The GorillaPod doesn't keep the camera too snug on the bike but it's low budget, cheap and cheerful. Someday I'll have the money to buy a proper bike tripod camera mount like the pros use for Tour de France videos!

Check it out: qik.com/video/13888 recorded live from my bicycle (the hardest part was fastening the tripod and the phone onto the bike, music courtesy of my N81 Musicphone)