HTC One X video capture... room for improvement?

So.. the HTC One X. HTC’s current flagship phone.

The all singing, all dancing uber phone with an all powerful quad core beating heart. So it should thrash anything else out there, right?

I’ve always been a big fan of camera functionality on phones, and whilst the stills camera on the HTC One X is great, the video capture.. isn’t.

Check out this video which shows the HTC One S recording 1080p video with a MUCH higher framerate. All this on a phone with two less cores!

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tykVoD9Dsc’]

So what’s the excuse? I’d like to think that HTC just haven’t been able to optimise the Tegra 3 chipset yet, and will have a fix out soon, but if it were that easy, surely it would have already been fixed?

To my surprise, after searching around there’s a good app in the market called lgCamera which allows you to choose framerate, bitrate etc and seems to do a really good job on the One X. It seems to produce slightly smoother videos, in my limited testing at least.

The only ‘funny’ is that it records in a slightly odd resolution, so you need to change the aspect ratio when playing back the video otherwise it looks squished. (If you use VLC, choose aspect ratio 2.21:1 – this seems to be the best fit).

The videos recorded with the HTC stock app don’t have this problem. I’m therefore hoping either HTC can fix this, or the developers of lgCamera can push out an update to resolve the aspect ratio when the file is recorded.

lgCamera can be found on Google Play and has a free trial. I will be buying it to support the developer and have asked about the above issue.

Link – lgCamera – Google Play

Comments (8)

Anonymous

how are we supposed to appreciate the “HTC One S recording 1080p video” using a 480P youtube video ?
- Anonymous
  
  i can clearly see that the one x is more glitchy and out of focus.
  - Mark Peters
    
    the One X doesn’t have any focusing issues, at least mine doesn’t… the video quality is excellent… it’s just let down by the poor frame rate in my opinion.
    - Anonymous
      
      Well looking at the video it seems to take much longer to refocus after panning. Just saying what I see. I do not have a one x or s and don’t really care about either having jumped ship to wp7.5. However p3ngwin’s original comment needed a reply as there was obviously a difference in quality between the two which he was implying was invisible.
- Mark Peters
  
  The point of the video is to illustrate the difference in FPS. You can clearly see that whatever the res.
Snitch

Looks like they still haven’t learned from the TYTN2 debarcle.
Steve Taylor

Mine is giving me the hump, I’m on my second one now and its still winding me up. The wifi turns its self off and constantly re-booting after coming out of nearly every app or prog.
Matthew Yun

Mark Peters, can you please release a video comparing:
1) HTC One S vs HTC One X w/ lgCamera
2) HTC One X vs HTC One X w/ lgCamera

That would be fantastic, thanks!