Comments on: Good Morning reading: Giz on why streaming video over 3G sucks

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:25:05 +0000

I've tried all sorts of port fwding changes, but can't get air vid to work over 3G 🙁

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:28:05 +0000

In reply to John Steele. strange thing is that YouTube doesn't seem to suck as much on Android devices. Anybody given those a shot? Vids seem to load faster and at higher resolutions on the few android phones I've quickly tried out.

By: John Steele

John Steele — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:17:57 +0000

Yesterday my family was at the Apple Store. Using a brand new iPad on Apple Store's WIFI to stream a low-definition version of the "You bit me Charlie" YouTube classic. We literally had to stop it and let it buffer 3 different times. That is completely unacceptable for less than a minute and a half clip. I don't even consider YouTube capability a feature for the iPhone, Touch, or iPad. Seems to me its a beta proof of concept, that some day this won't suck.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:35:04 +0000

In reply to Salman Arif. That's what I said! :D

By: Salman Arif

Salman Arif — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:19:28 +0000

Watching 24 in that quality? Unacceptable! ;]

By: Damien Benoit

Damien Benoit — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:54:00 +0000

Sorry to hear your 3G connection sucks. I live in downtown Columbia, SC and use AirVideo and I even used orb before, they both work fine when playing videos on 3G while im at work. I get lots of tv shows watched in between rendering projects and designing while at work, and it all streams well for me, quality isn't bad at all, actually amazingly good and it works fine!

By: dale

dale — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:25:22 +0000

Use air video and video is smooth and problem free. I'm on the Bell network in Canada, don't know if it makes a difference, but definitely one of the best apps I have for travelling- I'll usually watch movies in an airport.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:29:29 +0000

I think this is rather simple. Video over 3G sucks if there are:
(1) connection issues (too slow for whatever reason)
(2) server issues (e.g. only lower quality available if you're on 3G (YouTube), slow upload speed (AirVideo), etc.)
(3) license issues (no license for mobile or lower quality mandated)

By: John Steele

John Steele — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:01:51 +0000

I have the fastest residential internet that my local cable company (Time Warner Cable) provides. When I view wifi-connected YouTube videos on my iPhone it is still a bad experience, with frequent lags, and very slow starts.
Interestingly when I use Air Video, after a 10 second buffer, it works great, and if on 3G after a 30 second buffer, it works just fine.

Conversely, on my wife's dell laptop or my Macbook the same YouTube videos (or even their HD counter parts) run perfect. That makes me think its the device and not the connection. When I had my old Sprint touch with Skyfire browser I could use EVDO Sprint connection and watch an entire Hulu TV show in my browser. No hacks, no jitters, no lags. 5 seconds of buffering and it was good to go for 23 minutes.

My dad's brand new Sony laptop with his Verizon "high-speed dongle" couldn't go more than 5 seconds at a time.

My conclusion: Video streaming without wifi sucks and is not instantaneous, but the capability might be there (even 3 years ago with a crap phone and a so-so network, or today with Air Video). My next test is going to be to put HTML 5 and iPhone friendly videos on my own domain and password protect it and stream it. If the iPhone can't handle that I am going to give up on the streaming concept for a while.
Tube player.