Digitalwerks

After a few delays, the 1.5 (Cupcake) update for the Android G1 phone from T-Mobile has arrived.  Impatient as I am, I followed the instructions from the AndroidGuys and forced my phone to update, although I think I only gained about 12 hours ultimately.  In any case, it’s a big step forward for the phone and the Android platform, with some great UI improvements, including the much discussed virtual keyboard.

For me, however, the most exciting new development is the implementation of video recording on the G1.  After the phone is updated a new app appears, “Camcorder.”  The use is fairly simple, just point and shoot.  There are two quality settings, “Low” and “High,” with the Low setting designated for “MMS” usage.  One nice feature is that video recording is integrated into the Camera app, and the user can switch from video recording to still photography with the click of one button.

The captured video uses the .3gp container format for the h.263 video codec.  Audio is labeled as “samr” and is the standard 3gp audo codec of AMR-Narrowband.  Using the “High” setting the video resolution is 352×288 and the bitrate looks to be around 350-400 kbps.  ”Low” has a resolution of 176×144 and bitrate around 200 kbps.

The Camcorder app allows for very easy video sharing with one-touch email, MMS, and YouTube integration.  The YouTube integration works very well, at least with the relatively small size video files I have tested with so far.

How does the video look?  Well, not great.  The camera on the G1 is not particularly good, and turning it into a video camcorder has not magically improved it.  That said, the video recording on mobile devices is generally not very good from a visual quality standpoint generally, at least with the current generation of in-device cameras.  Motion is pretty jerky, the colors are not great, and the audio quality, while in stereo which is nice, leaves a lot to be desired.  Still, the ability to capture video on the fly and get it uploaded to YouTube very, very easily has a lot of promise for the G1 and future Android phones.  The killer app may be, though, live streaming.  I am very hopeful that Qik can get implemented on the G1 sooner rather than later.  Broadcasting live has a number of great potential uses that rely far more on immediacy a mobile allows rather than the quality it cannot currently provide.

Following up on my previous report on integrated Windows 7 codec support, I saw today from Volker Zota at heise that some new developments in the Windows 7 betas have come to light.  According to the investigative work of an ffdshow developer, as reported to Dan “BetaBoy” Marlin of CoreCodec, the latest beta of Windows 7 blocks the usage of third party video decoders from Windows Media Player and MCE.

As previously reported, Windows 7 differs from earlier versions of Windows in that it will ship with a number of popular video codecs already integrated, including most notably h.264.  There are some very notable caveats to the information as it stands right now: this is after all just a beta and might not be in the final released version of Windows 7, there will likely be work arounds, especially for other player software applications (like VLC and Media Player Classic), and because Windows 7 will come with h.264 already installed, many users will never need third-party decoders anyway.

Nonetheless, this move by Microsoft is still somewhat disturbing for it seems to be a big step backwards from what appeared to be Redmond’s increasing openness to third party solutions in the video world.  There remains a very active competitive landscape among codec developers and media software creators, outside of the (somewhat) closed garden that Microsoft would prefer Windows users to remain within, and such a move would definitely tilt things in the Microsft direction.  This isn’t IE versus Netscape, but it does reflect that kind of outdated thinking we all hoped Microsoft was moving away from finally.  I’m sure much more technical details will emerge in the next few days, but right now the blocking takes place at very deep levels of the OS.

I have written a couple of previous posts about my experiences using the T-Mobile HTC G1 Android Google phone, including an in-depth look at how it handles video playback.  As a way to help other G1 users get video on to their phones, I put together this step-by-step guide to using the MeGUI application to encode video into a format that the G1 can play, while retaining as much quality as possible.  Because of the relatively low resolution of G1 compatible video, I have not focused as much on making the files as small in size as possible, but once you’ve mastered the basic steps outlined here, you should not have too much trouble tweaking the process to get smaller sizes if that is of importance to you.  With microSD cards getting cheaper and cheaper, I frankly have not found much need to really optimize encoding for size, but your needs may differ.

As a follow up to my previous posts about the G1 Android phone from T-Mobile (and Google!), and from a personal interest, I wanted to gather as much information about the phone’s video capabilities as I could.  In general, there has not been much information available about the detailed video specifications of the G1, which has proven somewhat frustrating to those people interested in using it as a portable viewing device.

Word came down today from boxee and Hulu that the content owners behind Hulu do not want their shows to be available through the boxee interface.  According to Avner, the CEO of boxee, the two companies have been negotiating the last couple of weeks to prevent the cut off, but without success.

I’m going to have to assume this move makes sense from the perspective of NBC and Fox, because it certainly does not from a user’s point of view.  The stream of Hulu content that a boxee user viewed was precisely the same as what one saw from the Hulu website, including the embedded commercials that are the source of Hulu’s revenue.  The only thing missing was the wrap around interface of the site itself, which is not all that compelling in my opinion. So now a boxee user interested in watching The Office or Dollhouse will likely just get it off of Bittorrent, with all the commercials stripped.  Not sure how that’s a win for anybody.

Maybe the content owners heard that boxee got some VC funding and think they are deserving of a cut, but that is like them demanding money from the creators of Firefox, because the browser is the most popular manner users are accessing the Hulu website.  Silly.

I would suspect, with no real knowledge, that it would take the boxee team literally minutes to figure out a way to keep the Hulu content coming through their interface, no matter what the content owners say, but Avner and company are respectful and will not do that.  I’m sure others, though, will gladly take up the challenge and create plug-ins or hacks to get around any hurdles Hulu puts up.  In other words, the result of this action will likely mirror what’s going on at The Pirate Bay Trial right now, with the perceived outlaws getting a ton more publicity and the flow of content hindered not at all despite the wishes of Hollywood.

Also interesting is that this is a serious misstep on Hulu’s part (regardless of who actually made the decision).  Jason Kilar and his team have done a pretty amazing job walking a fine line between users, technology, and their content backers, but this really lays bare the tensions underneath the surface of the site.  This is not likely to be the last time such issues crop up, and Hulu is going to have to be very creative and sure-footed to maintain a positive relationship with their users.  It may prove an impossible task in the long run.

Clearly not taking to heart the Leia maxim I pointed out recently, another content owner organization is taking to the legal system to solve their piracy problems.  In this case, though, it is the Swedish government, on behalf of Hollywood et al., that is trying to eliminate a pesky business model upsetting technology, The Pirate Bay.  Janko has the all the important information over at NewTeeVee, but to really get a flavor of events in Stockholm, everyone should check out the trial site maintained by the legendary Pirate Bureau themselves.  It gives a great flavor of the intelligence, humor and overall snottiness of the Pirate Bay crew that has endeared them to millions of pirates (and others) over the last few years.

I predict two things to come from this trial.  

First, Hans Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde (the three main admins behind the site) will from a media relations standpoint run rhetorical rings around their opponents.  They are experts at it and the spectacle will actually be the most entertaining element of the trial, without a doubt.  

Second, and more important in the long run, nothing that happens legally at the trial will make any difference in the real world.  Guilty, not guilty, it won’t matter.  If the Pirate Bay site is taken down, if the admins are put in jail, if they receive a huge fine, etc., it will have no material impact on the availability or speed at which illegitimate content gets shared via Bittorrent or other networks.  Other sites will just pick up the slack.  Nothing will be achieved, other than to create far more publicity for the site and to engender more sympathy for the admins themselves.

As reported by MG Singler over at VentureBeat, there is evidence to believe Apple successfully pressured Google to keep the multi-touch feature off of the first Android phone, the G1 from HTC, even though the phone has the capability to implement it.  

If this is true, or if Google just feared what Apple would do if they implemented multi-touch, I have to say, it would severely disappoint this G1 owner.  I fully realize that Android has compromises in regards to openness and hackability (the key features that drew me to it in the first place), but if Google of all people is so easily bullied away from innovation, that raises real questions about the value of the Android platform over the long haul. Hopefully this was a minor misstep that Google will learn from and never repeat, but it certainly bears very close scrutiny in the future.

An interesting bit of news from the doom9 forums.  As anyone who is testing the Windows 7 beta has discovered, and as the above photo shows, Microsoft is breaking with their tradition and including more codec support in the upcoming Windows bundle.  Previous Windows versions did not even include MPEG-2 decoding, which proved to be quite mystifying to many users trying to watch a DVD in their computers for the first time.  And, needless to say, Microsoft stayed far away from any of the more esoteric codecs, including the key MPEG-4 ASP implementations such as DivX and Xvid.  

However, the beta of Windows 7 includes the ability to play back DivX, and Xvid, and even the next generation MPEG-4 AVC, better known as h.264.  Why is this important?  A couple things.  First, if anybody needed further proof that VC-1 is essentially dead in the water, this is another nail in its coffin (to mix macabre metaphors).  Secondly, and more importantly, it appears that Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon of broad interoperability, allowing Windows users to play back a range of video formats right out of the box, something that will surely be a boon to less sophisticated users who just want to be able to watch something without having to even know what a codec is, much less a container format, audio stream, etc.

Even more intriguing is the news that Microsoft may be working on an implementation of the matroska container, or mkv for Windows 7 (according to madshi and haali on doom9).  For the file-trading community, this is quite significant.  H.264 has a ton of “legitimate” uses today, notably in higher quality Flash videos on YouTube and elsewhere.  MKV however, is almost exclusively used currently by pirates, particularly those sharing HD video.  Blu-Ray rips and high def TV captures are generally distributed as x264 encodes with AC3 audio in mkv containers (both 720p and 1080p), and while HD video content is still a small minority of what is shared relative to standard def video, it is growing and is likely to become the dominant format before long.  Maybe Microsoft is just getting back at the movie studios that went with Blu-Ray instead of the MS-backed HD-DVD formats, but regardless, it would be good news if mkv support signaled that Microsoft was thinking about their users first, and video business strategies second.