video support

[temigu]

will we be able to watch videos on other sites other then youtube? like divx streaming videos and stuff like that

[Jorsher]

Not initially, but there will be apps to do so.

[Chefranelli04]

if you look at the desciption on t-mobile.com it sayes and i Quote "Watch your favorite videos, even YouTube, anywhere" that sounds like yes but i have heard only Youtube alot

[Jorsher]

The user guide does not show any application for watching videos other than youtube though, so I'm still betting that it doesn't have a video player except youtube.

[tread]

that maybe the case, i think we'll just have to wait and see... if it doesn't, chromium is open source and i'm sure there is someone that will make it possible... if not, maybe skyfire will jump on board with their awesome windows mobile browser

[bizarro_stormy]

yea, i'm sure there will be alot of people working on app for pretty much everything that we all want that didnt come with the phone

[RussianSolja]

as of right now there is no proof that you can watch video's off other sites the google browser cant handle streaming videos just of yet but like said before apps will be made to support streaming video's off other sites.

[DesignDawg]

It doesn't have a built-in non-youtube player yet, but there is a video player available. However, I read somewhere (in the manual maybe?) some mention of setting your browser to play internet videos in the youtube player. Like, maybe if there's a movie embedded somewhere, you would click it and youtube would automatically launch and play the file? if anyone knows where I found that reference, feel free to post it. I will if I run across it again.

[stopcrazypp]

There is already a third party video application downloadable in the App Market on the demo phones called "Video Player v0.1, by Jeff Hamilton".

Here's a full list of apps on the market when the phone was unveiled:
http://www.appscout.com/2008/09/googles_android_app_market_23.php

See 1:20 in this video review for Video Player v0.1 in action. This review used to be on Engadget but they took down for some reason so it took me a while to find it.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/engadget/videos/57/

They mentioned it had mpeg4 support and showed accelerometer landscape view works on it, but it should also support 3gpp since Android has that support for media recorder output.
http://code.google.com/android/reference/android/media/MediaRecorder.OutputFormat.html

You guys should know Packet Video helped Android build its media software stack and this brochure mentions h263, h263, mpeg4, 3gpp media streaming and playback. Some people mistaken it and thought Packet Video did a media player, but what they did was actually a software stack, not a media player.
http://www.packetvideo.com/resources/OpenCORE-brochure.pdf

Strangely after the 1.0 sdk was out, this object class was removed:
http://code.google.com/android/reference/android/media/MediaRecorder.VideoEncoder.html
You can see it is now a dead link. The old link showed support for h263, h263, mpeg4, 3gpp encoding. I suppose this explains why they didn't have video recording at launch, probably similar to the bluetooth, it just needed more work or some things were wrong with it.

But I don't really get why they didn't just make a video player included in the phone besides from the youtube one already on it, since they have the codecs built-in and it shouldn't be hard to make.

If you guys are talking about playing videos in the browser that is a totally different thing from a general video player. Most videoplayers on the web requires flash or someother plug-in which even the iPhone doesn't support yet. Flash support would require Adobe to develop an app or some third party open source flashplayer to be developed. Other random video plugins like Microsoft's Silverlight will be even harder to support. Currently the G1 only plays youtube videos after you click a video link in the browser, it doesn't work for other videos.
See it in action here at 0:20 :
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJJhqOVcjsI[/ame]

[RussianSolja]

i do alot of web browseing and i really do hope that they will come out with apps that will allow us to stream video's off other sites! thats my number one concern.