Again, our good friend ritalin, has tipped me off to some more amazing tricks. You can actually use Picasa 3.8 to sync video files to your Android phone and stream them over 3G, 4G or WiFi. I must say it is pretty amazing and works extremely well. He has even informed me that it works great on older devices too, such as the T-Mobile G1. Here is how you can set this up and give it a try.

The first step is to download and install Picasa 3.8.  Picasa is free and can be found on picasa.google.com. After you’ve installed Picasa, run through the set up as you normally would on any other program.

Next we want to get the web album set up:

On the top right of Picasa you will see “Web Album“, click on it and you will be asked to sign in with your Google account. You can go about that in one of two ways. You can use your regular Google account and keep it all to yourself or go to Google.com and create an email account just for sharing. I chose to set up a secondary email account just for Picasa so I could let my friends sync up to the web album and stream videos and get wallpapers from me. If you wish to use your current Google account, be sure after setting up the “web album” to go into your device and enable Picasa sync. You would do that by going to Menu > Settings > Accounts and Sync > select the Google account you used for Picasa and checking the “Sync Picasa Web Albums” box to sync.

Next we want to make life super easy. In the Picasa application on your computer go to Tools > Options > File type and check all the boxes. This will just help you to avoid any issues later on.

Ok so now we have the program set up. Now we need to get the folders set up. Picasa needs a folder so that it can be displayed in your gallery on your device. In order to achieve that, I simply created a new folder on my external hard drive. Named it the name of the movie I was adding, then I copied the movie to that folder. Before you get on a roll and start adding tons of folders and movies somewhere, there are 2 things you need to know. Picasa will only allow you to upload a video file that is less then 1GB and MP4′s tend to cause more issues then standard AVI file types.

Now you have a folder set up with the movie you want to be able to watch. From here we need to upload it. This is where I got stuck for a little while. Once I figured it out, it was on. What you will want to do is go up to the upper left hand side and click on File > Add file to Picasa. Then find our movie folder and movie and add it.

Once it has been added you are ready to upload it. This is the part the drives me nuts and can take sometime. The end results are worth the wait though. With the movie folder highlighted, go to the bottom of Picasa and select “upload“. Let the wait begin.

Once the file has successfully been uploaded you can now go to your gallery app on your Android device and you should be able to find the file name and tap on it.

I hope this helps get you in the right direction to give this a try. There are a few more things to know about. When you get your web album set up, you will notice you are only given 1GB for uploads. They offer some amazing plans if you want even more storage though.

• 20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
• 80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
• 200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)
• 400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)
• 1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)

Not too bad really. Especially if you get a couple friends to toss in 5 bucks a year.

Now for potential issues. Ritalin advised me that HTC devices running the HTC Sense UI have some issues using the web album  in the Sense gallery. There is a work around for that issue. Head into the market and download Gallery 3D, this will let you sync Picasa to your HTC Sense device. I have included that application below for you guys.

UPDATE:  You should make sure you are uploading these movies to Picasa with “Sign-in Required to View” for each of the video folders. Its not necessary to making it work, but its a good idea to protect them from MPAA removal requests. Thanks for the heads up and tip, AGAIN, Ritalin.

Click or Scan the QRCode below to find out more information about the Gallery 3D application. 
Summary and Downloads:

Application: Gallery3D
Developer: Rayman50
Cost: FREE