About Videos

I have a very ambivalent attitude towards videos. I like them when e.g. I miss a performance by one of our girls and I can then see it on video taken by someone who was there to video it. But videos posted in Facebook, or on news sites etc. I don't click almost ever. I like to look at photos much better. Besides, I encouter fundamental problems with videos in more ways than one.

For most of my daily Internet surfing I use my iPad. Work laptop is for work, and home laptop is mostly used by the kids, and way too clumsy anyway when sitting on the sofa relaxing. I use my iPad on the bus for morning news and facebookin, and at home for almost anything I do.

My iPad is jailbroken, and I use the user agent faker with the Safari, for the general better user experience. But this creates a problem with videos: most web sites (including Facebook and Youtube) feed the videos to iOs Safari in HTML5 format, but for the Chrome desktop UA I use, they send them as flash videos. And iPad does not support Flash. See where I'm going? I usually don't watch videos because I can't without changing the UA, and it's just not worth it. I like still photos and written news better any way any day.

So ok, this is a minor issue, and solely my personal problem (though I generally don't even consider it more than a nuicanse - I believe in one HTML5 standard anyway and think videos should be served as such anyway). But the thing that really ticked me off today, was my futile attempt at getting some videos out of my Lumia (820, don't think that actually matters) and onto my iPad so that I could a) share the video in Facebook and b) more importantly use it in a blog post.

Was it easy? No. Did I succeed? So far, no.

Photos are automatically saved to Sky... 'scuse me OneDrive. I fully understand that it is not very economical to be auto-uploading videos, so they remain on my phone until I manually do something with them. Today, I picked the best ones I wanted to save on my hard drive and the one I wanted for that blog post and manually uploaded them to OneDrive. Then I opened OneDrive storage on my iPad and was prepared to download at least that one of them, let's call it dog video, to my iPad.

Did it work? No.

For photos, there is download. But for videos there is only open in another app. Which downloads the video and opens it in some other app. My option were iMovie, Documents and Dropbox. I thought iMovie was a rather obvious choice, and everything went smoothly until the iPad opened iMovie - it told me that only audio files are supported. Um, what?

I tried sending the video to myself in my email, and at first thought that wouldn't work either. I usually use the Gmail app for my gmail, and that had the same options for the video download as OneDrive. But the native iPad mail app came to rescue - there I was finally able to get the video and save it to my camera roll.

So, as for the options of getting videos from your Lumia to some other device/storage, you can either use a laptop and

1. connect phone to it by cord and copy it in file system or via the dedicated app or
2. upload video to OneDrive and retrieve it from there on your file system or
3. send it in email and retrieve it from there on your laptop.

But if you want it on your iPad, you need to send it to yourself in email and use the native Mail app on iPad. Ok, I did not explore the Dropbox option, but I'm guessing it, as a third party app, would work pretty much the same as the OneDrive or Gmail apps.

Much ado over nothing...

P.S. I later discovered that Blogsy does not regard videos in camera roll, nor did it retrieve it from Facebook where I already had shared it straight from my phone, so in order to have my own video in a blog post, I apparently need to go get my laptop after all. Eyeroll.