Nokia N97 Live Video Tests with Qik
I woke up early Saturday to play basketball and saw one of my buddies set up a pocket HD camcorder to get some video from the games. This reminded me that I can take videos on the spot and share with my friends (almost) live from my Nokia phone with Qik.
Convenience
If my buddy wants to share his video online he’ll have to transfer the video from cam to PC first, then PC to Youtube. With my phone, all I have to do is open the Qik app to stream live and it will announce to my Twitter and Facebook automatically if they want to watch. There’s even an option to copy the video over to Youtube automatically or manually with one-click.
I tested Qik today on the Nokia N97 with 3 videos and set it to the nHD quality (640×352 resolution). Check it out below.
Basketball in the AM
Rollerskating and dancing at Central Park
Hula hoops
Problems. Qik sounds very simple, right? Just shoot and it’ll be there for everyone to watch before you arrive home. No extra steps needed.
I noticed some problems though. If I’m not connected to wifi, the video will be very laggy to the people watching it live. It reminds me of watching a Youtube video with a 56K modem. Remember those days?
I was connected to AT&T’s 3G network and streaming with the 640×352 resolution takes about double the length of the stream to finish uploading the whole thing. However most of my friends will most likely discover the videos much later so they won’t even notice the delay.
Dirk on 28 June 2009:
qik is great for sharing live video, but what i don't like about it is the very poor sound quality. I know it's a bandwidth thing but that really bothers me. I prefer to upload the video to flickr or any other video service. Sure, my friends can see it not until some minutes later, but the quality is much better…
Mark Guim on 28 June 2009:
I agree with the quality of the sound while streaming. I think I'll just record then upload afterwards with Share Online for better quality.
Andrew on 28 June 2009:
I tried to send a 10 MB video using the Nokia messaging, but it gave a message (Low memory )!!!! when I check my phone memory status it gave me the following :
Phone Ram: 32 MB
Phone Memory: 2 MB
Mass Memory: 25 GB
I am using the phone for 2 weeks and I copied 4 GB of music to the mass memory and installed some programs to the Mass memory too.
All My Videos and captured images are saved to the Mass Memory and I choose it as the default storage for my SMS, MMS !!
After investigating the situation using the buit in file manager I got the following result for memory scanning :
Phone Memory Usage:
Applications: 5.5 MB (The Built in Widgets)
Messages: 2 MB
Others: 40 MB !!!!!!
Dear Marcus, Do you have the same issue ? after I cleared the web browser Cash it came up to 20 MB , but still no enough compared to my 5800 which have 57 MB free phone memory !!
matthew bennett on 29 June 2009:
If you want to get the best quality from Qik videos, use the Offline mode. You can record the videos with Qik to the memory card, then seemlessly upload them in the background. This will give you the highest quality from Qik, because it's not trying to stream every bit.
–credit goes to the Qik team, who let me in on this little secret.
Mark Guim on 29 June 2009:
Makes sense. Thanks for the tip!
matthew bennett on 29 June 2009:
If you want to get the best quality from Qik videos, use the Offline mode. You can record the videos with Qik to the memory card, then seemlessly upload them in the background. This will give you the highest quality from Qik, because it's not trying to stream every bit.
–credit goes to the Qik team, who let me in on this little secret.
Mark Guim on 29 June 2009:
Makes sense. Thanks for the tip!
matthew bennett on 29 June 2009:
If you want to get the best quality from Qik videos, use the Offline mode. You can record the videos with Qik to the memory card, then seemlessly upload them in the background. This will give you the highest quality from Qik, because it's not trying to stream every bit.
–credit goes to the Qik team, who let me in on this little secret.
Mark Guim on 29 June 2009:
Makes sense. Thanks for the tip!