iPhone Video Recorder

Posted on March 10th, 2009. Written by Arron.

Ever since I bought my iPhone, I’ve wanted to record a video. Just a simple 1 minute video, like you can do on other phones. However, Apple refused to let me. Then I found iPhone Video Recorder. Video recorder? for iPhone? Don’t get too excited ..

As some of you may already know, if you follow me on the social networking site Twitter, I recently took up the decision to jailbreak my iPhone 3G. Yes, yes, I did it. Now while I chose to do this, with the recent posts we have featured on piracy I assure you my mind-set remains the same as it always has done on the matter:

I do not and will not support or condone the pirating of software. I believe in supporting software developers for their hard work they put into their applications, in every way possible. Ok, Now that that’s out of the way, I am of course talking about iPhone Video Recorder available from Cydia ..

Note: This application is not available on the App Store and requires you to jailbreak your iPhone to gain access to it. Now, purely for legal reasons alone, I am not going to link to or state the process(es) I used to achieve the jailbreak. This is purely a review of a piece of licensed software.

What is Cydia?

“Cydia [sih-DEE-uh] is a package installer/manager for the iPhone and iPod Touch, created and maintained by Jay Freeman (saurik), which allows users to browse and download applications from a range of sources.

Most applications are available to download for free, with some requiring purchase after downloading, and as of the 1.0.2790-44 release, applications are available to purchase from within the application. The applications are downloaded directly to iPhone or iPod Touch and are located in the /Applications/ directory , in the same place where ‘Apple’ native applications are located.”

Source

Produced by DreamCatcher iPhone Video Recorder is a purchasable software package from Cydia which allows you to record video from the iPhone’s built in still camera, in both .MOV and .MPEG4. After trying the trial version for just an hour or so, I bought a full license from DreamCatcher, chiming in at $19.95 (~£12).

Basics
Opening the app, you’ll see the video viewing window. This is inactive and shows up as a white rectangle until you initiate any kind of video recording. To record a video and bring the window to live, you simply hit the camera icon (located bottom center). To stop the recording, just tap the camera icon again.

See it in Action:

Settings
Tapping the ‘Gear-like’ icon (bottom right) you’ll enter the app’s settings panel. From here, over 4 3 separate tabs you can choose from; allowing auto-encoding, to the video encoder you wish to use, video mode and resolution, image quality, brightness of the video, volume amplifier settings, and finally audio bitrate options (32bps, 64bps and 128bps).

iPhone Video Recorder currently offers two video codecs .MOV and .MPEG4, although is more generous on the video resolution options offering 320 x 240 (landscape), 240 x 320 (portrait), 384 x 288 (landscape) and 288 x 384 (portrait) options. The app also offers up various image quality options. Nothing advanced, just the usual; Lowest, Lower, Better and Best.It’s worth noting that image quality and video options are only effective when you choose .MPEG4.

Playback & Extras
Playing a video back is as simple as touching it. Each time you touch a video from the video list a context menu pops up from the bottom of the screen with a few extra options. These include; Playback, Share, Rename, Delete and Dismiss. Just tap ‘Playback’ to play your recorded video.

Another interesting feature is ‘Share’. Tapping this gives you options to upload your recorded video straight to YouTube from your iPhone or iPod touch, or if you want to export it, you can e-mail it to someone in the recorded chosen format(s).

Issues
There are however a few issues with iPhone Video Recorder. Firstly, you need to jailbreak your device to access the software. Although an easy process (of which I’m not prepared to outline here) some people are still fearful of it – and rightly so. The second is a indirect bug. A sort of strange happening reported to me on twitter by Nicholas:

“@razorianfly Make sure to mention it buggers up Cycorder by limiting it’s frame rate. At least it did on mine!”
- @nicholasmaxwell

Apparently this bug occurred even before the software was licensed, and without having both applications installed at the same time myself, I have yet been unable to replicate the issue described.

Overall
I’m extremely happy with the iPhone video Recorder. Being able to record video from my iPhone with the touch of a few buttons, and then being able to upload it to YouTube or e-mail it to a few friends; $20 was such a small price to pay for such a quality product. Do you have iPhone Video Recorder yourself? Let us know about it in the comments!