I was at the December foss.my meetup, something I haven’t been to in a while. I had told Aizat that I’d attempt to record the session, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t find the AC adapter for my video camera!
With less than an hour to spare, I decided to give Qik a try. It seemed to work in my initial testing, so I headed to the location and decided to give it a twirl.
Executive summary? It just worked. AeU had a good enough WiFi connection, and broadcasting Mohan speak live, just worked.
The MyOSS Meetup
Mohan talked to us about oAuth. His slides are online – Mohanraj – Securing Your Web Api With OAuth. If you want to grab the video, don’t hesitate to look at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Note that there are also comments from the live chat feature – very cool.
Why is it in 3 parts? I received three phone calls during that one hour session, and everytime the phone rang, and I cancelled the call, it would end up in me having to restart the streaming. Oh woe!
Live chat? Allowed a few others to join in on a myoss meetup, without actually being there… There might have been five people chatting, with two actually being in the room ;)
My initial thoughts on Qik
- Its dead easy to setup. I broadcast video now at my Qik account.
- It allows export to .3gp (which I presume will work in real player on my Nokia), and mp4 (which may work on an iPod?). It doesn’t do .ogg, but neither does anything you can find hardware for commonly…
- It doesn’t seem to playback in my phone, in browser (with OperaMini or even the standard Series 60 browser). It also looks like playback in the iPhone doesn’t work. I understand kyte.tv fixes that (but its woefully slow in Malaysia, so a waste of my time)
- It seems to be pretty choppy on my UMTS connection. Bad Maxis… So there’s lots of buffering, before
- When it buffers, it uses the phone memory, instead of the memory on the memory card… this means that with about 100+MB free on the e71, you run out of memory after about 10 minutes of video… and then it kind of hangs the phone (typical of S60 devices). It involved rebooting my phone once
- The moment the connection resumes to qik.com though, everything buffered gets uploaded in an instant. Great!
- 1 hour of video knocked 2 bars off my battery, while using WiFi
- Receiving phone calls, breaks video streaming. This is annoying. Continue recording, please!
- There seems to be no way to concatenate videos together. It would be wise, considering the problem above, where you actually get phone calls…
- It integrates with Twitter. So those following me there, or on FriendFeed can know when I’m broadcasting something live. Smart.
- There is mapping capabilities on the website… but it didn’t seem to integrate with the GPS in the phone. Why? Maybe I need to look harder
- It looks like it integrates well with iTunes… so this is a great tool for video bloggers and video podcasters… with enough adoption, I see this as being crowd-sourced JenniCAM… a way for the current camwhores to become videowhores!
There seems to be a little trend of Qik users now… han and aizat are broadcasting BarCampJB live on Qik. All in all, hat tip to @thechannelc, whom gave me that “aha moment” before going to the meetup – I saw her short clip of StartupCampKL, and was amazed that it was live, coming off an e61i…