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Video Streaming With Picasa and 3D Gallery

Hello everyone,
I am here to show you step by step on how to use Google's Picasa media storage services to stream HQ movies straight to your phone so that way you can save space on your phone. Now this technique can used by multiple users at once so if you can co-workers or family members that you want to share your movies with, this is the guide for you.
Here Are Some Things You Will Need:
1: Gmail Account (Either your personal one or create a new one if you plan to share your movies with others)
2: Picasa Uploader 3.6 (Used for uploading your movie files to your Picasa account)
3: Movie Converter Program (DVDcatalyst is my personal favorite and the easiest or some other good ones are Handbrake, meGUI or DIVX Converter that will work for this as well)
4: 3D Gallery (If you dont have a Google Experience device like the G1 or Motorola Droid, then you will need to google "Android 3D Gallery APK" and install it via the guides it gives you.
Optional:Quicktime may be needed in order for Picasa to recognize certain file types.
How This Works
Picasa is Google's service that has been around for years. Its primary function is place to store all your photos. Now recently they have made it so that you can upload home movies that you've taken with your digital camcorder for safekeeping. When you upload your movies thru Picasa Uploader, it converts the movie file to .FLV just like the same format that Youtube uses. The cool thing is during the encoding part, it keeps the same resolution and bitrate that you used when you encoded the movie. Now, the trick to this all is that the new native 3D Gallery program that comes with the Google Experience phones(Android phones that dont have a custom UI but stock look kind of like the Motorola Droid phone) with 2.1 OS or higher has the ability to stream those movies directly from your Picasa account to your phone.
Encoding Movies For Optimal Streaming
There are multiple guides on how to do this that I will list below but one thing you want to take into consideration is the Bitrate. Bitrate is kind of like the quality of video, if it is set too high, the video is cleaner but the file is huge but on the other hand, if it is set lower, the video might be pixilated but the file is a lot smaller. The trick is finding a good balance between Bitrate and filesize because Picasa does have a storage limit and also bigger movie files take longer to stream to your phone thru Gallery.
Here are two different guides to re-encode your movies, either one works for this technique but the DVDcatalyst is the easier way to go.
http://www.droidforums.net/forum/droid-faq/14858-how-convert-videos-use-droid.html
http://www.droidforums.net/forum/droid-audio-video/35019-streaming-hi-quality-video-android-tversity-nswplayer.html
Uploading Your Movie Using Picasa Uploader 3.6
I am not going to tell you how to setup Picasa but you need to direct it to your folder for where all your newly encoded movies are being stored at. Now you might run into a error if you encoded your movies using the guides above where the movies dont show up. To fix this, you must have Quicktime installed in order for Picasa to recognize these movie files that were encoded using their CODEC. After installing Quicktime, you must reboot your PC and once rebooted, in Picasa Uploader, go to Tools> Options> File Type and check off .mov as available files for Picasa to view.
After setting up your folders in Picasa, go ahead and link Picasa Uploader to your either your personal gmail account or the community gmail account that you plan on using. From there, right-click on the movie file and select upload to Picasa Web Albums and it will put it into a queue to upload to Picasa. From here, either go smoke a pack of cigarettes or drink a 6-pack because it takes a few for it to upload to Picasa and when it gets there, it takes a couple hours for Google to re-encode the movie into an .FLV file for mobile playback. It will show up in Gallery but if you try to play the movie and it says something like "This Movie File Cannot Be Played" then it means that Google hasnt finished converting it yet.
Playback Thru 3D Gallery
After you are done uploading your movies to Picasa and waiting for Google to re-encode the movies, if you have added your Gmail account properly thru Accounts under settings incase its your primary account or secondary if you plan on sharing with others, then when you open Gallery, the movies you have uploaded should show up now. Depending on if you are using 3G or Wi-Fi and how big the movie files are, then it can take some time to start streaming. It takes anywhere from 10 secs to 1 minute to start streaming on 3G whereas on Wi-Fi, it only takes 2-5 secs to start.
If the movies dont show up, trying taking a picture and uploading it to your Picasa account. Sometimes it requires you to do so in order to establish a link from Picasa to your phone.
Anywho, thats about it. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions regarding this method of video streaming.

[Q] Can't attach a video

When I shoot a video I can't attach it to my email using Gmail. I keep getting message "file is too large". I am able to attach the same file using Yahoo mail. Can this be fixed for Gmail.
I also tried first composing an email and then attaching a video but when I click "attach" I cannot find my videos only pictures. Where are all the videos stored?
Thanks,
Mac

Videos are stored on the sdcard in the same place as the pictures:
/sdcard/DCIM/Camera
The videos are named in this format: VID_20110101_143547.3gp

distortedloop said:
Videos are stored on the sdcard in the same place as the pictures:
/sdcard/DCIM/Camera
The videos are named in this format: VID_20110101_143547.3gp
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks. That's what I thought. But why after I write an email and click "attach" I only see pictures and no videos?
Also, why right after shooting a video, when i try to attach it in my gmail, the file is too big and won't attach? The same file works fine with yahoo mail.
Thanks

[Q] view folders in gallery?

Anyone know how to view folders in gallery? More specifically, I want the ICS way to sort by photos and videos. I have thousands of photos and a fraction of that in videos. It's a pain to sort through them all just to find a video.

Videos from Z5 not showing any thumbnails when I browse the files from PC

I am trying to pick certain videos to take off my phone but I have no idea which ones I should be taking because no thumbnails show up nor can I group the files by date created or anything because all files just get sorted under "unspecified" which is weird because on the phone it has the date of recording and all that. I can see the thumbnails for all the pictures just fine just no .mp4 video files.
Any suggestions?

Man just use AirDroid it is faster than cable transfer and has gui and you can see what you want.

Videos not found in Videos or Gallery apps, but are seen in My Files

Hello all. I bought the S6 for my daughter, and she is having an issue with getting a video uploaded to Instagram. The video in question was taken by my wife and uploaded to her Google Drive. At this point, my daughter downloaded the video from Google Drive, and then, she tried to share it. She keeps getting a message that it can't be imported and that there is a problem processing the video. If I use My Files, I can find and directly play the video using Google Photos to do so (Google Photos is the only option provided to me to play the video). However, it's not found by the Gallery and Video apps. My wife sent her the video via Instagram (private message?) also, and that video works and shows up just fine. I will note that the video she sent via Instagram is an edited .mp4 file and the original from Google Drive is a .mov file. Can Samsung Video and Gallery apps not read .mov files? If they can, does anyone know why they won't show up on the phone or be uploaded via Instagram? Thanks in advance.