I did not see any other open threads on this; there is a very simple system edit you can perform to record video @ 8 mbps, up from the default 3 mbps. This is from a reliable source. Works very well. Root access is required and, of course, be sure to backup everything before you try anything.
The Droid compresses recorded videos (which results in blurriness and some blocking), so today I started poking around the system files and found this line in build.prop:
Code:
ro.media.enc.hprof.vid.bps=3000000
Which basically means video is compressed at a fixed rate of 3Mbps. I didn't think it would work, but I went ahead and changed the value to 8Mbps:
Code:
ro.media.enc.hprof.vid.bps=8000000
Rebooted and shot a test video. Lo and behold, the video is now recorded at 8mbps, resulting in a MUCH crisper image!
To apply the fix, you need root access. Simply edit that line in your /system/build.prop file. You can pull the file from adb, edit it, and push it back, or mount the /system partition as read-write and edit the file with Astro.
Edit: For the more adventurous users, here's another tip: I've been tinkering with the rest of the video settings in build.prop and comparing the resulting videos. So far, the best setting I have found is actually using MPEG-4 SP instead of H.264, 8 Mbps bitrate, and 30 frames per second. The phone chokes at 30 fps in H.264 mode, but does a pretty good job with MPEG-4 SP, and at that bitrate, the image quality is still very good regardless of the codec. The pertinent settings are "ro.media.enc.hprof.codec.vid" for the codec ("h264" for H.264 and "m4v" for MPEG-4 SP) and "ro.media.enc.hprof.vid.fps" (you can choose anything from 1 to 30)
The Droid compresses recorded videos (which results in blurriness and some blocking), so today I started poking around the system files and found this line in build.prop:
ro.media.enc.hprof.vid.bps=3000000
Which basically means video is compressed at a fixed rate of 3Mbps. I didn't think it would work, but I went ahead and changed the value to 8Mbps:
ro.media.enc.hprof.vid.bps=8000000
Rebooted and shot a test video. Lo and behold, the video is now recorded at 8mbps, resulting in a MUCH crisper image!
To apply the fix, you need root access. Simply edit that line in your /system/build.prop file. You can pull the file from adb, edit it, and push it back, or mount the /system partition as read-write and edit the file with Astro.
Edit: For the more adventurous users, here's another tip: I've been tinkering with the rest of the video settings in build.prop and comparing the resulting videos. So far, the best setting I have found is actually using MPEG-4 SP instead of H.264, 8 Mbps bitrate, and 30 frames per second. The phone chokes at 30 fps in H.264 mode, but does a pretty good job with MPEG-4 SP, and at that bitrate, the image quality is still very good regardless of the codec. The pertinent settings are "ro.media.enc.hprof.codec.vid" for the codec ("h264" for H.264 and "m4v" for MPEG-4 SP) and "ro.media.enc.hprof.vid.fps" (you can choose anything from 1 to 30)
adb works just fine.
