Comments on: Palm Pre Video Recording Demo'd

CamcorderVideo recording was first achieved on the Palm Pre by homebrew developer cpcrook back at the beginning of August, via the Linux command-line, but until now nobody has released an easily-viewed demo into the wild. Jason Robitaille over at PreCentral has now uploaded a video put together by forum denizen zonyl to YouTube, so we can all sit back and feast on our eyes on the rather good-quality 320x480 @ 30fps results (especially in comparison to the hideous camcorder quality of previous Palm OS-based devices).

Jay has also created a simple homebrew service that can enable video recording right now, downloadable here and installable via WebOS Quick Install. Other WebOS Internals developers are also tinkering with gstreamer to get the Pre recording at its full 720x480 capabilities, and with video sink support to enable previewing as you record. You'll find the demo video embedded after the break.

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should have been standard

hsu @ 9/27/2009 5:08:16 PM # Q
Why wasn't this functionality part of the phone out of the box? It's not like the aged Palm Treo couldn't do video recording.
RE: should have been standard
Tim Carroll @ 9/28/2009 6:19:39 AM # Q
I've often wondered the same thing myself. The only possible explanation I can think of is that it is on Palm's to-do list, but way, way near the bottom (after expanding Synergy to encompass all the major online services, getting proper system-wide copy-and-paste, getting OpenGL up-and-running, fixing the damn Calendar etc)

The hackers have repeatedly demonstrated how simple it is, so that's the only explanation that really makes sense to me. Palm have bigger fish to fry.
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RE: should have been standard
SeldomVisitor @ 9/28/2009 6:33:38 AM # Q
I'd say Palm had its reasons, probably interference between other applications,etc, that have yet to be revealed.

RE: should have been standard
bhartman34 @ 9/28/2009 10:37:36 AM # Q
hsu wrote:
Why wasn't this functionality part of the phone out of the box? It's not like the aged Palm Treo couldn't do video recording.

My guess (and that's all it is) is that the functionality wasn't quite ready to be incorporated into WebOS. The current solution (at least, the one I have installed from a few days ago) uses a custom-written service and some behind the scenes shell scripting.

RE: should have been standard
prenos @ 9/28/2009 3:02:13 PM # Q
I am almost guarantee you (judging by various comments throughout Palm's code as well as the gst patch) that Palm simply ran out of time. They had to spend, what I believe, to be a large amount of resources just getting their camera working properly. And for the record, they DID include support for video, or it wouldn't be working now. This isn't homebrew anything, it's just developers getting to work what's already there (no offense to Jason, who did a wonderful job on the service). If Palm didn't include their own binary video encoder, nothing would work. It seems they just ran out of time getting everything to work properly. The biggest issue is right now is the Pre can't play back the videos it takes.
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