Google Drive video uploads now instantly viewable

Cloud storage, like the kind you get from Google Drivecan get away with being fairly simple; at least, it only needs to provide a way to upload a file, and a way to retrieve it later. Of course, competition drives innovation, so it’s no surprise that most major cloud computing vendors offer much more than that, with everything from automated backup tools to advanced sharing options. Today we heard about a new feature that makes it even easier to work with video files using Google Drive.

Google has been bringing new features to Drive lately, such as much-enhanced document scanner We just talked last week. During the year we also saw many improvements driver video player — Yes, if you haven’t tried it yet, you can stream your uploaded videos directly from Cloud Drive. Back in October, Google launched a major overhaul of its video player, with an updated user interface and new playback controls. Now its next trick is, Google Shared drives can start playing your videos as soon as you upload them.

To understand why this is such a big improvement, you have to understand how Drive handles your video files. Once you upload a video file to Cloud Drive, you can always download it later and get a 1:1 copy of the original video, just like you would expect from cloud storage. But to provide the built-in player, Drive will also transcode your video into a copy that’s more suitable for streaming, just like it does when you upload a video to YouTube. As any creator knows, waiting for transcoding to complete can sometimes take quite a while.

However, from now on, you can start playing videos as soon as they are uploaded to Drive. As you can see in the screenshot above, this solution is still not perfect and you will have to wait for the process to complete before you can share your videos with your friends and family via the Drive player. But especially if you’re working with a lot of your own videos, this still sounds like a worthwhile step forward in terms of Cloud Drive availability, making it easier to identify uploaded clips and find what you need within them.