Just a follow up to my previous post on video on the Android, as has been reported a few places, Qik is now available for the G1. It has a lot of limitations, based on the T-Mobile network and the camera hardware, but it does work, and it opens up some very cool possibilities. The ability to live-stream from such a small device will allow for video coverage of places that previously would have been impractical if not impossible.
I’m really looking forward to doing some field testing with Qik on the G1 at the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con, which should be a lot of fun, at least as long as I can keep a 3G connection, and the battery holds out.
With the addition of video recording to the Android G1 via the Cupcake
update, there is more interest in video on the phone than ever before. Â While I’m still waiting to see some live-streaming solutions emerge for the phone, there are some new applications that help to optimize the video experience of the G1.
EncodeHD is a very nice program developed by Dan Cunningham that provides super simple one-click encoding of video into a bunch of mobile device friendly profiles.  I sent Dan the specs I had discovered and put together for MeGUI encoding, and he very quickly was able to add a G1 profile to his program.  Unlike MeGUI, EncodeHD uses ffmepg instead of x264 as its encoding engine, but otherwise it does a great job of making a complex task very straight forward.  It’s also very fast!  He is still doing some tweaking to the G1 profile of EncodeHD, but I would encourage users to try it out right now and then just update when he has a new version.  One thing to be aware of though, is that EncodeHD is not very sophisticated when it comes to cropping, so if that is an issue with a video you have, you may want to use MeGUI or another encoding application for that.  But if you have no  interest in digging into the details of video compression, EncodeHD is a great option.
The other G1 application I’m excited about is the
Act 1 Video Player, an actual Android app that can be downloaded from the Android Market. Â There are other video players available for the G1, but this is easily the most full featured and sophisticated. Â I really like the sophisticated user interface that blows other players out of the water. Â In fact, I liked the program so much that I purchased the $.99 full version (there is a free lite version as well), which makes it the first for pay Android application I have ever bought. Â Can’t think of higher praise than that.
With EncodeHD and the Act 1 Video Player any Android user with a desire to maximize the phone’s video capabilities would be off to a very strong start.  Now if we can only get Qik to provide streaming, we’ll be in business…
An update to my previous post about the Swedish Pirate Party growing after the Pirate Bay verdict.
The results from voting today has the Pirate Party winning roughly 7% of the votes in Sweden, which will allow them to gain 2 seats in the upcoming EU parliament. According to reports from Sweden, the party did quite well among the young, receiving around 19% of voters under 30. From a US perspective those numbers may not seem too significant but in a proportional representative system, it’s actually very, very good for an upstart party, although the usual caveats about the general disinterest in EU voting certainly applies. Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that outrage among young Swedes over the Pirate Bay verdict did indeed cause a reaction. Whether or not the 2 Pirate Party representatives in Strassbourg can make a difference among the 725 other MEP’s remains to be seen, but if the copyright lobby expects to continue its crusade against file-trading without opposition, both legal and otherwise, they may be in for a rude awakening.
See Torrentfreak for more detailed coverage and discussion.
