As a follow up to my previous T-Mobile G1 (Google) Android phone coverage, I wanted to gather information about the handset’s video capabilities. I haven’t found detailed G1 video specifications – proving somewhat frustrating to those interested in using it as a portable viewing device.
At the basic level, the G1 can decode the
h.264 codec in .mp4 and .m4v container formats. If you are familiar with iPod/iPhone video capabilities, you should recognize those specs, as they are pretty close to what Apple is using. And that is likely not a coincidence, as my guess is that video was somewhat neglected in the G1’s development and choices were defaulted to an already established format. I assume that video as a category was overlooked for a number of reasons: unlike the iPhone with iTunes, there is no established commercial entity selling video content for the G1. But probably more important is the fact that Android is a platform targeted for a number of different hardware devices, and not just phones but MID’s, netbooks, etc. It probably didn’t make a lot of sense for the Android developers at Google to put a lot of time into a video format that may only be specific one device, the G1. And from the other direction, the actual manufacturer of the phone, HTC, I suspect probably handed everything over to Google, since video can be something of a headache for phone makers without a lot of expertise in this area. In other words, G1 users were kind of left on their own when it comes to video, something pretty clearly shown by the fact that the phone did not even come with a native video player application! A couple popped up almost immediately, but they aren’t particularly sophisticated or polished.
So, reaching back to my days with the DivX Certification lab, I devised to determine what, in fact, the video capabilities of the phone actually are and then to come up with an encoding profile that would take the most advantage of what the G1 offers. I created dozens of test clips with a wide variety of encoding parameters and tried to play them on the phone. Once I had learned what the G1 can and cannot play, I started looking at which options provided the best compression compromise between size of file, quality of image, and speed of encoding process.
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