I have one of those hightech photo enabled mobile phones which also can serve as a video camera. So during the Oktoberfest I take some small video clips with it to possibly upload them later on Youtube or Google.
First of all they are really small: just a few 100kb, so the transmission via infrared to the computer is trivial.

The format lookes strange, never have seen .3gp as a file extension before. Anyway, Quicktime plays them without a problem. The resolution is small (174×144 or something similar), the framerate ok, the audio simple. So, let’s start uploading them, and send the link to the friends. Easy sounding plan.

Youtube takes them without a problem. I select the private option (not everybody on the world has to find and see the videos anyway). Uploading of the 250kb is a matter of seconds, everything seems ok. I click on the movie page and can watch the clip. Looks nice. So, let’s take the link and send it around.

Well, they cannot watch it. The video is private. Cannot be seen by people I don’t actually add to the list of friends. So, how do I add them? It’s not that easy. They have to create an account at Youtube, not something your grandmother can do easily (already clicking on the link in the email is not easy for her). There must be another easier way to share a video without publishing the link everywhere.

So, well, I remember having clicked the option that embedding of video into a private site is allowed. Sounds perfect. Once again, the flash video player is opened for the friends, but it stops, telling that the video is loaded, but nothing happens. A google search tells me that private videos can be embedded, but the people who want to see them must be logged into their Youtube account. So no win against the sitution before.

Google has its own video service now. Maybe it’s better. I already have an account there for other things. Hence uploading the video is easy. And great, I can exclude it from their search engine (therefore kind of private) and even put it on my website to be visible by everybody. BUT: their 3gp support is bad. I only see the key frames of the video. So something like one frame per second. Great, I must have bad luck today.

Maybe converting the 3gp to normal avi, mpg or whatever works. Google shows up the Mobile 3gp Converter for that. It creates raw AVIs. They play fine locally. Uploading them also works, just takes some time as they are uncompressed (16MB now!). BUT: Playing them with the Google video player flips them upside down. Did I say something about luck already?

So last chance, let’s convert them into a sensible video format like Xvid. Videodub launches. I click on the “open video” menu item and enter the raw AVI video. BUT: “out of memory” exception by Videodub. I am lucky!

There is the great MEncoder out there, the encoder counter part of mplayer which plays everything. I install it and after some time of playing around with the 578 different command line option it in facts creates a video which is not upside down. BUT: mplayer doesn’t know the video codec. Great! Somebody made it work, but only with some recompiling. Arghhh…

It cannot be so hard to publish a video of a consumer device like a mobile?! I use Windows for all that, so no excuse that companies do not care about the platform. How much of an expert in videos on computers must one be for that?!

Already nearly given up… while writing this text, I want to take a screenshot of the upside down image, but not so huge as on the Google site. So I embed it into my website, scaled down. I click on play to capture it. BUT: it works, it is correct! Just the first picture (which is shown before you click on play) is flipped. Why?????