Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL; DR
- Google Drive is getting some improvements for handling video files
- Uploaded videos no longer need to go through the processing stage before you can stream them.
- However, other viewers must wait for the encoding to complete before you can share it with them.
Cloud storage, like the kind you get Google Drivecan get away with pretty bare bones; at the very least, it should just provide a way to download the files and a way to retrieve them later. Of course, competition drives innovation, so it’s no surprise that most of the major cloud players offer richer experiences with everything from automated backup tools to advanced sharing options. And today we’re hearing about a new add-on that makes using Google Drive a little better with video files.
Google has been doing quite a bit lately with bringing new features to Drive, like the much improved ones. document scanner we talked last week. We also saw a number of improvements during the year Driver’s video player — that’s right, if you haven’t tried it yet, you can stream your downloaded videos directly from Drive. In October, Google overhauled the video player with an updated UI and new playback controls. Now to his next trick, Google shares that Drive can start playing your videos as soon as you download them.
To understand why this is such an improvement, you need to look at how Drive handles your video files. When you upload a video file to Drive, you can download it later and get a 1:1 copy of the original as you would expect from cloud storage. But to offer its built-in player, Drive also converts your video into a copy that’s more suitable for streaming — just like YouTube when you upload your videos to it. And as any creator knows, waiting for that transcoding to finish can sometimes take a long time.
Now you can start playing your video as soon as it finishes downloading to Drive. As you can see in the screenshot above, this solution is still not perfect and you will have to wait for the processing to complete before you can share your video with friends and family via Disc player. But especially if you’re working with a lot of your own videos, this sounds like a worthwhile step forward in Drive’s usability, making it easier to identify uploaded clips and find the content you need within them.
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