Posting Video Blogs to blip.tv from the Nokia N93
Earlier today, I had posted a video of my daughter to blip.tv, which then made it’s way here. At least lately, I have been trying to avoid posting what can best be described as personal items to this blog. However, one could consider it part of my ongoing evaluation of the Nokia N93 as well as the whole concept of posting video while you’re remote, so therefore it has some relevance to the topic at hand.
Last time I took a video of my daughter at gymnastics and tried to post it to the web from there, I failed miserably. Not only could I not get the video posted from the phone, but I also ended up deleting it so I couldn’t post it even from home! It turns out a couple of nasty bugs exist: if you email a video you just took, it may possibly delete the video if, for example, the video is never emailed correctly. Also, it seems the built-in email client on Symbian doesn’t handle extremely large file attachments all that well. I’ll have to experiment with these items a little more to understand exactly where the pitfalls are.
Today, I was determined to take a large video while at gymnastics and post it on-location. Geeky? Surely. But I’ve got the tools, they have WiFi. It was a challenge waiting to be conquered. At Andy’s suggestion, I tried to use vpod.tv to post the stuff. No dice. The website would load from the browser on my N93, but because it thought it was Safari and it’s optimized for Firefox, I wasn’t getting in to do anything useful. sigh
So for kicks I loaded up my page on blip.tv, logged in, and tried to upload the video file, which because it was recorded 30fps at 640×480 resolution, ended up being nearly 12mb, even though it was a 30 second clip. The Nokia N93 has an advanced enough web browser–and enough memory to run it–that it was able to handle the Javascript/CSS that the blip.tv site was throwing at my phone. I was able to do the entire thing in the same way I’d do it from my desk at home–well except for the data entry parts via the N93 keypad. But it all worked out. I even went back to www.phoneboy.com and changed the HTML filter for the posting so all of the “script” tags in the original posting would be active.
Given how relatively simplistic YouTube’s interface is, I might be able to do the same thing there as well. However, blip.tv automatically posts my files to www.phoneboy.com, which is a cool feature and one reason I don’t use YouTube as my primary depository for this kind of stuff for that very reason.
Of course, it would be nice if at least one of these services had some sort of a client or at least a stripped-down page for mobile devices where they are easily able to upload large movies from a mobile device. And post it to your blog via XMLRPC. That would be cool.
In short, movblogging (mobile video blogging) has got a ways to go before people start doing this en-masse, or at least enough of a mass to be called a meganiche.
