S60 Video Streaming Smackdown!

Or, more accurately, “My S60 Unscientific Video Streaming Smackdown” — you’ll see why soon enough…

So now that I’ve a fancy HSDPA-enabled handset and an unheard-of-in-Canada 6GB of data per month to play with, it’s about time I stream some video to teh interwebz, right?

Fortunately for S60 users there are no less than three options to get the job done. Two of them were featured on AllAboutSymbian.com a few months ago; a third app, Kyte.tv’s Mobile Producer, has been given the thumbs-up by no less than Robert Scoble — in part because the project is heavily funded by Nokia.

Naturally I wanted to go with a winner, so I downloaded Kyte.tv to my E71. Here’s what I don’t like about it:

1. It sticks an extra mailbox in my email app without asking.
2. I don’t get a dedicated URL on Kyte.tv where I can send people to see my vids — something like kyte.tv/acurrie — instead they have to go to the site and search for my user name manually.

And there was one other thing, what was it…? Oh yeah, the service doesn’t work. See for yourself in this example, streamed from my handset at a local food court:

I figured that my recorded video resolution was set too high, so I tried another option where you capture first, then automatically upload saved videos to the Kyte.tv site. Unfortunately this didn’t work either, and I came home from an afternoon of making movies only to find that they were still cued for upload.

So much for Kyte.tv, then. I ran into yet another problem when I tried to wipe it from my E71 — the malware alarm went off when I discovered that I couldn’t delete the app for some reason, but I eventually figured out that I had to sign out of my account from my handset first.

The next candidate was Qik, which I had previously tested over a WiFi connection with my E61i. Here’s a sample streamed live to the internet from The Bad Dog Theatre’s holiday party:

Despite being up-ressed to 640×480 pixels and what sounds like a significantly compressed audio stream, the end result is watchable at least. Even better, users get a dedicated URL — mine is Qik.com/acurrie — that they can send to their respective peeps.

But best of all, Qik videos can easily be embedded into Facebook pages, which is probably the most suitable destination for crap like this, anyway…

A Requiem For emTube

Loyal readers know I’m no fan of Apple’s iPhone, mostly because its many fanboys and girls are blissfully ignorant of other smartphones and what they can do. The iPhone’s YouTube Player, in particular, is surprisingly bad when compared to the premiere YouTube app for S60, emTube.

emTube Search

Start up the emTube app and you’ll be greeted with a nice clean interface, allowing you to see the top-rated and most viewed videos on the site, or search for something more specific — in this case a little submission of my own from last summer’s iPhone launch in this country.

emTube Results

And here’s where emTube puts Apple to shame: I can view the streamed video using an available connection or I can download it to my handset for playback anywhere else. The saved file is optimized for the resolution of my handset — in the case of my E71, 320 x 240 pixels. Click here to see an archived copy, and download the associated file to see how much better it would look on my phone!

emTube Fail

But all is not well in world of emTube. The trouble started when the developer went MIA sometime last year — not a huge issue as copies of the last-known release are widely available on Nokia’s MOSH.

But now it seems our beloved YouTube app has stopped working entirely. You can still search for videos but try to view or save them and you’ll get the error message shown above. And judging from the cries for help on the Howard Forums this issue affects S60 handsets and users worldwide.

Thankfully there are alternatives, the easiest of which is to visit YouTube’s mobile portal on the built-in S60 web browser. Clicking on any of the videos will launch the on-board install of (ugh) RealPlayer, with predictably awful results. And of course there’s no way to save the video to your phone, although you can at least save a link to the specific video stream.

CorePlayer YouTube Interface

I chose instead to purchase an app called CorePlayer. At $30 USD it ain’t cheap, but it does support a wider array of video codecs, including my personal favourite.

New to the latest release is an integrated YouTube player. It took me a while to find it; this app was originally built for touchscreens, and the UI for devices without one is fairly bewildering.

CorePlayer YouTube Options

There are certainly a lot of options, though. And it’s here in the specific settings for YouTube streaming that I may have found an answer to why emTube no longer works. Choosing FLV (Flash video) or H.264 (QuickTime) as a file handling protocol yields the same error I get with emTube. Only Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) delivers the goods, so it seems that the folks at Google are the ones responsible for this mess — though why they’d want to deny a superior YouTube experience to the world’s most popular smartphone OS is beyond me.

If you’re wondering, CorePlayer’s RTSP video looks nowhere near as nice as FLV or QuickTime, but it’s at least better than RealPlayer’s ghastly solution. For now it will have to do. Rest in peace, emTube, you will be missed…

Why Are Broadcasters Trying To Break The Internet?

WTF?!1!

In the same way that DVD region-coding has no place in this, the age of Amazon, eBay and unlocked players, television broadcasters have no business trying to restrict their content on the web.

I can illustrate from my own experience with two examples of how they’ve tried and failed:

1. Crossing Streams – I do a lot of my morning newsgathering courtesy of reddit.com, an awesome social bookmarking site run by the good folks at WIRED. Often there’s a link to a poignant Daily Show clip from the night before. But because I live in Canada, when I click through to see the video — or even to their home page for that matter — I get redirected from Comedy Central in the US and A to The Comedy Network in Cana-duh. If you’re also reading this from north of the 49th parallel try it for yourself and see what I mean.

So what’s the big deal, you ask? The very same Daily Show clips are available on both sites, after all…

Well, why exactly is this even necessary in the first place? If ComedyCentral.com is smart enough to figure out that I’m from Canada, surely it can be programmed to include IP addresses from this country as well.

Could it be that there is country-specific advertising that these two networks want to alternately block or force me to see? Wow, that sounds familiar… Kind of like television!

Thing is, the internet has this thing called a proxy server, where a site can be fooled into thinking a user is from somewhere else, and for those pesky ads Firefox has a plugin called AdBlock Plus.

Half-time score: Internet 1, Broadcasters 0.

2. iFailer – BBC’s much-lauded iPlayer was launched on Christmas Day, 2007 to bring the Beeb’s vast catalogue of programming ” to a mass, mainstream audience.” But while streaming radio is offered worldwide, on-demand video is currently UK only, despite most of the very same programming being available on BBC America, BBC Canada and another 20 or so channels around the world.

I have a personal interest in the iPlayer because of a just-announced client for S60 smartphones, but even though my handset gets me online anywhere in the world, you guessed it — the mobile version of iPlayer only works in the original Nanny State.

Of course, I could easily get around this with a Slingbox hooked up to my TV and a mobile client on my handset — not only is it entirely legal, but I can watch any channel I want from anywhere in the world!

Final tally: Internet 2, Broadcasters 0.

Let me be perfectly clear on this: Broadcasters, do not mess with our internet; you will fail. It’s called the World Wide Web for a reason — if you’re not willing to show whatever it is that you’re shilling to a global audience then please get the fuck off and leave us alone. Thank-you.