shelbinator.com

Just some video niblets to flesh out last week’s OMGNokia woody.

I never officially told the non-blog-reading YouTube subscribers about my new gig, so forgive the intro; but here is a little look at the N95 I get to borrow for the next couple days:

I’ve been messing around with the Flixwagon video streaming application to see what it’s capable of, and I can definitely live with it. There used to be another Symbian handset-based live streaming application floating around out there that I heard of from time to time, but a quick scan of the Googles isn’t refreshing my memory. So for now, it seems my two main choices for video streaming from the N95 are Flixwagon and the more talked about Qik. Neither is perfect, but I think Qik has a slight edge in features for now. Qik will apparently automatically Twitter your friends when you start a live broadcast, and it will also cross-publish the live video to Mogulus, a multi-videographer publishing platform from which you can assemble a whole team of reporters into one video stream.

Both Qik and Flixwagon have a chat window available through which your viewers can send you questions and comments while you are broadcasting. Too bad for MTV News fans, though, the Flixwagon commenting feature is not enabled for our Super Tuesday coverage, but that’ll be a key feature for the future full launch of Flixwagon once they’re out of alpha phase. And both Qik and Flixwagon have audio defects, in addition to being generally thin and tinny due to bandwidth constraints (the standard Ustream settings were the same way, unless you cranked up the sampling to 44 kHz); which additional defect is more annoying is up to the individual’s taste, I guess. All the videos of the WEF I watched on Qik have a crackle in the sound, like the input gain was set too high. Flixwagon, on the other hand, has a slight but frustrating time lag in the audio somewhere between a half and a whole second. As far as post-broadcast editing of footage for use on the network, the time-lag is far less of a nuisance to MTV, and anyone else interested in re-mixing recorded video, than the audible crackle would be: you can fix the delay in the editing, but the crackle is there to stay. Flixwagon has the edge over Qik there.

The N95 itself is capable of sweet video, though, so if quality is a premium over immediacy, it’d be well worth recording a video locally and uploading it over a 3G network to Blip.tv, which sadly isn’t part of the pre-installed upload connections on the phone (Flickr and Vox for starters…seriously, Vox?). The audio is pretty rich for a handset, and the video — well, just have a look for yourself.

Stay tuned tomorrow.