I sometimes have to post videos online for client approval, and have used Youtube or Vimeo. I also sometimes put a clip (usually H.264 in a Quicktime wrapper) on Dropbox. For this latter path, it takes time to render the .mov, and then the client has to download the file from Dropbox to insure that it plays smoothly.
So yesterday I decided to check out Google Drive, which is a freemium cloud storage service, seemingly like Dropbox, iDrive, etc. I grabbed a random file of about half a GB off my RAID; this file happened to be a 30 second camera original clip recorded on a Pix 240 at DNxHD 145. So I uploaded it to Google Drive, and then emailed a link to myself.
When I opened the email on my HP desktop 'puter and clicked on the link to play the DHxHD clip from the cloud, within 2-3 seconds the clip played in real-time, with audio, without any apparent dropped frames. I thought to myself "Something's fishy here. There's no way this 500 MB file can be downloading within the 32 seconds from the time I pressed "play" until the end of the clip. (We only have about 20 mbps bandwidth coming in from the web.) So then I opened the link on an iPhone, and again, it played cleanly straight through without downloading.
So... WTF is Google Drive doing? I haven't found any explanation on the web, but here's my conjecture: When I uploaded the file, Google Drive automatically parsed it as video and flagged it. When I later played it, Google Drive pinged me, checked my bandwidth, and played the original file, decoding the DNxHD on the fly and re-encoding it on the fly.
Today I tried playing this DNxHD file directly from the local hard drive of a cheap old office computer, and it could only stutter about 5 fps, which looked awful. But on that crappy 'puter, playing the same file over the web from Google Drive, it looked smooth, with no dropped frames. On the screen I found a pulldown menu with choices of resolution from 1080p down to 360p, and (for this crappy computer, running Firefox) the resolution had defaulted to 720p. (For the iPhone, the pulldown resolution menu wasn't visible, so I'm guessing that Google Drive knew that it was talking to an iOS device with limited processing power.)
So it appears that Google Drive is automatically doing a whole bunch of what I used to do manually when distributing video via Vimeo. It looks like it takes a high bit-rate original, then handshakes with the eventual viewer and re-encodes on the fly at an optimum bit-rate for that pipe and viewing device.
Can anybody confirm or refute my conjecture? Am I nuts, or is this a really smart and useful service?
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