Pretty brilliant stuff.
Dom Q. Silverio
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Dom Q. Silverio domqsilverio@gmail.com>wrote:
> http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2691634
>
> "Drive makes it easy to store and share your video files. Videos that
> you've stored on your Drive are automatically encoded so they're ready to
> view in any web browser. And by sharing videos from your Drive instead of
> emailing them, you avoid having to send large video files as attachments."
>
> Dom Q. Silverio
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:28 PM, wilsonchao wilsonchao@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>> Search the official Complete Avid-L archives at:
>> http://archives.bengrosser.com/avid/
>> Yahoo! Groups Links
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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