Questions about filming video with the Pinephone

ARM Technical Assistance
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I’m hoping this is the right category for my question, I’ve been trying to find an answer for ages but no amount of online searching helped with this one. I’m planning to order a Pinephone Beta soon (150$ version) ideally next month if money allows… I use Manjaro Linux on my desktop and having a phone with it too will be a dream come true. One thing I wish to know first relates to the camera: I see in the specs that it’s 5MP for back and 2MB for front, but can find absolutely no information on how it films video! More specifically I wish to know the following:

  1. First and foremost, what resolution and frame rate is video shot at? I need to be able to record in at least 1080p @ 30 FPS, the abilities of my current phone (an ancient Samsung Galaxy S3). I’m actually hoping filming at 60 FPS is going to become possible for me after this upgrade, but can take 30 as long as the resolution is 1920x1080 and not less.
  2. Is the video format mp4? Asking as I remember old phones had weird ones (such as 3gp) which some applications couldn’t even play properly. That was very long ago however.
  3. This one’s less important but still good to know: Can you use the flash while filming for shooting night time video? On that matter, is there a night setting to make video shot in darkness brighter at the cost of extra blur, so even if it’s blurry you can at least see something?
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If you plan to do a lot of flashing images of Phosh, Plamo or even Lomiri, or even iamges provided by other distros, then you will find PinePhone a nice toy. Then if you plan to report all the issues you find, then that will help. As a daily driver is not ready IMO.
You can do tricks like using simplescreenrecorder to record what Megapixels is showing … because for now there is no other way to use directly the camera to record videos aside what is explained here
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11178
Also, if interested, trough the Matrix protocol there is a way to have a decent video call too … but is still not there yet.

1 Like
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That’s good to know as far as recording the screen goes: It’s actually a feature I never had or used on any other smartphone I owned. Was curious about the normal builtin camera for now, how well you can shoot video through the back camera when doing standard recording.

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