There was some talk recently about movloging (mobile video blogging) and the iphone, particularly in reference to flickr's new video features.
Thought I'd provide an update. When last this came up there had been only some proof of concepts showing that the current iphone was at least capable of some video recording. There are also some rumors apple will add video in one of the next releases along with GPS and 3G support (maybe 1st week of june?). Anyway, there continues to be a lot of interest and 3rd parties seem to be making some progress at using the built in still camera to record video. Case in point. http://www.iphonevideorecorder.com/ They now have audio and video working pretty well according to what I'm reading on the blogs. http://mytriniphone.com/blog/2008/04/iphone-video-recorder-version-116-full-feature-update/ == Some stats == - max framerate: 15 fps - max size 320x416 - mpeg4 compression - multiple compression qualities *one hour "high quality recording" suposedly uses up 60MB of disk space - 32/64/128bps audio recording - cost: $20 (there is a free trial) - currently requires the phone to be jail broken - automatic volume sensitivity adjustment - supports sending of videos via email (in other words it can post to flickr, blip or any service that supports email) == major issues == The big issue seems to be encoding. The current iphone isn't fast enough to encode on the fly, (or maybe the current software isn't fast enough) so while you can record / encode on the fly with limited results (dropped frames) they recommend post encoding. Meaning it captures the video to the hard drive in raw/ uncompressed format and then processes it after the fact. I see no problem with this as long as you have plenty of free space. I do have a minor concern over how long this takes and how much it eats up the iPhones batteries. The only major issue then that I see is general usability. How hard is it to launch, shoot, and upload a video to your favorite service. == Other issues == * there is of course no zoom or image stabilization, i.e. this will absolutely not be substitute for a Sanyo Xacti or other seperate recorder, it's purely for video "twitterings" * For some there is also still the issue with the camera on the iphone being on the opposite side of the screen, thus you won't be able to see yourself in the screen while recording yourself, but I'm sure videobloggers will get used to it. Hopefully apple will figure out a way to adress the issue in future iPhones. * not sure what this is based on, doesn't appear to be open source. I think it's using ffmpeg for compression. I think that's it, and while I really need to get my hands on it and try it does seem like a practical mobile vlogging solution. If anyone tries it please be sure to post a good review and some videos. Thanks, -Mike mmeiser.com/blog
