Improving browser / player integration
Following on from my earlier post about the role of mobile in the lean forward / lean back worlds, there are a number of ways in which browser / video player integration can be improved and streamlined.
Plenty of you I’m sure will have ideas here. A few of us in the community have been discussing this already, and a forthcoming blog post will outline these ideas. If you have any of your own, please feel free to feed them back as a comment.
Many of these improvements rely on experimenting with new ways in which the device and the server can interact – for example to feed back information about bandwidth availability, which the server can use accordingly.
The key problem here is having a “real” environment in which to test ideas – in other words, a real streaming server. Fortunately Yospace have helped out here by providing a demo environment on their YospaceCDS product. So let’s think about exciting new things we can do to enhance mobile video streaming, and get developing!
To see the environment, point your phone’s browser at http://cds1-feed.yospace.com/00002544283. Click “View” on the first screen, then either “Play (Standard)” or “Play (Medium)” on the next screen.
Note: I’d like to keep the comments to this post free for brainstorming ideas. If you are having problems getting the demo to work, I’ve created a thread in the multimedia forum.
December 1, 2009 at 10:51 am
Do you think it might be worth adding some more clips (or versions of the existing one) in higher resolutions and framerates? Both the standard and high ones played perfectly first time on my Nokia 6220 Classic (using 3UK’s 3G network), but judging by the filenames they are “only” 176×144 @ 15fps. Given that modern Symbian phones have 320×240 or 640×360 res screens (or even 854×480 if you’re lucky enough to be in Japan) it might be a good idea to have clips in those sizes (and with framerates up to 30fps) to push the handsets a little harder.
December 1, 2009 at 11:20 am
The clever thing about Yospace’s service is that it handles all of that for you. There is only one piece of source material, which is 1280×720 @ 29.97 fps (I’m showing my TV background there). Yospace’s system detects the capabilities of your phone and converts accordingly (even between codecs if needed).
However, I think there is also an attempt to scale the content to fit into a certain pipe. One of the improvements I’ll talk about in the next post is to do with bandwidth detection, since I think Yospace assumes only one size of pipe at the moment for Symbian devices.
December 1, 2009 at 1:42 pm
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