s3ntrax's Blog

If any of you use Google Docs you already know that Google allows you to upload any file you want to it. Not all files can be viewed on the iPhone using the mobile interface (safari). One thing that Google has recently added is ability to stream videos from your Google Docs to your computer.  It uses the same technology and player as YouTube so therefore it allows for actual streaming and not simply downloading the whole file all at once.
You might also know that natively Safari cannot open AVI or any other file format except QuickTime and MP4 files. If you navigate to your Google Docs account via Safari and click on a video file in MP4/Apple native format it will begin to stream!!! 

Now you got your small personal cloud where you can upload a bunch of videos (or mp3s) and stream them right to your iPhone using either 3G or WiFi.

Google limits the amount of free space for your Google Docs to 1GB. This might not be a lot. What I have done, is that I signed up for extra storage.

For $5/year you get a whooping 20GB of storage space. That’s a lot of space for practically nothing!

The only thing that I would like to add is that Google Docs does not re-encode files on the fly as it only stores them so if you upload a file in super high quality that is huge in file size it might take a long time to stream over 3G.

 I would recommend encoding your video files with less bitrate and playing with settings on your video encoder, therefore allowing for faster streaming with less buffering.