Digitalwerks

With the addition of video recording to the Android G1 via the Cupcake update, there is more interest in video on the phone than ever before.  While I’m still waiting to see some live-streaming solutions emerge for the phone, there are some new applications that help to optimize the video experience of the G1.

EncodeHD is a very nice program developed by Dan Cunningham that provides super simple one-click encoding of video into a bunch of mobile device friendly profiles.  I sent Dan the specs I had discovered and put together for MeGUI encoding, and he very quickly was able to add a G1 profile to his program.  Unlike MeGUI, EncodeHD uses ffmepg instead of x264 as its encoding engine, but otherwise it does a great job of making a complex task very straight forward.  It’s also very fast!  He is still doing some tweaking to the G1 profile of EncodeHD, but I would encourage users to try it out right now and then just update when he has a new version.  One thing to be aware of though, is that EncodeHD is not very sophisticated when it comes to cropping, so if that is an issue with a video you have, you may want to use MeGUI or another encoding application for that.  But if you have no  interest in digging into the details of video compression, EncodeHD is a great option.

The other G1 application I’m excited about is the Act 1 Video Player, an actual Android app that can be downloaded from the Android Market.  There are other video players available for the G1, but this is easily the most full featured and sophisticated.  I really like the sophisticated user interface that blows other players out of the water.  In fact, I liked the program so much that I purchased the $.99 full version (there is a free lite version as well), which makes it the first for pay Android application I have ever bought.  Can’t think of higher praise than that.

With EncodeHD and the Act 1 Video Player any Android user with a desire to maximize the phone’s video capabilities would be off to a very strong start.  Now if we can only get Qik to provide streaming, we’ll be in business…