The video recorder of the iPhone 3G S can heavily be enhanced. As opposed to the iPhone 4, where the main enhancements are “only” making the field-of-view much wider, the data rate selectable and, with pixel binning, the low-light performance much better (by sacrificing some resolution and speed), the enhancements of the 3G S camera, in addition to the better low-light performance through pixel-binning, are waaaay superior: you can greatly increase the resolution, almost to the level of the iPhone 4 or traditional cameras.
The first real iPhone 3GS video camera hack released!
I've just released the 3G S version of my previous iPhone 4-only camera hack (see http://www.iphonelife.com/blog/87/how-you-can-make-your-iphone-4-much-more-versatile-video-camera ; please check out the iPhone 4 manual for more info on how the GUI works. The 3G S version is only a bit different from the iPhone4 one, so, your learning curve won't be so steep as when starting from scratch.). The tool allows for greatly increasing resolution and fine-tuning data rate (in Simple view) and fine-tune all parameters (in Advanced view).
Back in 2008 and 2009, I've already introduced (see THIS and THIS) MobileTerminal (by Allen Porter), a local, Cydia-based (sorry, jailbreak is required!) terminal emulator you can use for a lot of things; among other things, changing the root password from the default „alpine” to something (if you do install OpenSSH) less dangerous.
(Note that this article, as with most of my stuff, shows you not only how the camera can be reconfigured, but also shows you - how you can play back a YouTube video frame-by-frame; - how you can create and upload packages to your Cydia [an alternative to Apple's AppStore] repository and, last but definitely not least, gives you a full source-level explanation of the entire app that I've written to quickly switch between the different iPhone4 camera configurations. No one has released anything similar for the iPhone 4 or the iPhone 3GS [for which I'll also release a very similar utility in a few days] before!)
UPDATE (09/12/2012): I've created two truly 1080p versions of the counter video. They're HERE (non-streaming-optimized) and HERE (optimized for streaming with Subler). The former has a H.264 level of 4.2 (the latter is 4.1) and, consequently, can't be played in their Web browser. (Neither 4.1 nor 4.2 1080p60 can be synched to iOS devices directly. Playback from third-party apps using hardware decoding works, of course.) HERE's a 4.1-level version of the same file.
UPDATE (08/19/2012): version 1.2 of iMkvExtract has been released in the meantime. It, unlike the previous (by me, updated) version, works just fine under Mountain Lion and doesn't need to be manually updated any more. That is, you no longer need to do what is explained in my 14-month-old article below.
Original version follows:
As some of you may know, I, among other things, also lecture on iOS programming. Due to the request of my students, I've spent some days on discovering the secrets of Game Center, which has been added to iOS in version 4.1 and is, consequently, pretty new and, apart from Apple's own documentation, very scarcely documented, let alone stand-alone, full demo application sources, of which I only know of GCPing, which is, for some reason, pretty much buried in the Apple developer forums. (I don't provide a link to GCPing because I don't know whether the developer wants to keep it pretty much private. Now that there's no NDA over Game Center any more, he may want to publish it to the public.)
If you've read the VGA output-specific remarks in my Web Browsing and PDF Reader bibles (more specifically: the dedicated row in the charts), you may remember I've complained about all(!) of the VGA output-enabled titles not producing high-resolution output on Retina display-equipped 4th generation iPhone and iPod Touch models.
As I've been updating my official iOS Programming course with everything dedicated to programming the VGA output, I've decided to find out what the problem is caused by.
iOS devices (the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad) are particularly well suited for Web browsing. For example, I do most of my Web browsing on my iPad and not on my desktop (notebook) computer(s). One of the reasons for this is the instant availability, the excellent battery life, the you-can-browse-anywhere approach and, of course, the great IPS screen of the iPad, which is way better than anything else on a desktop, unless it's also an IPS screen like those of old(er), pre-2007 high-end IBM / Lenovo Thinkpads or the iMac. For example, my high-end 17” MacBook Pro (late 2009 model) has a pale and much inferior screen compared to that of the IPS and it's only my old Thinkpads (a t42p and an a31p) that offer the same screen quality as that of my iPad.
Since my last, dedicated post, the following important events have happened:
1.) a brand new iPhone / iPod Touch-only Web browser, 360 Browser has been released. It has some unique features not present in any other current iOS browser, not even the best one (iCab Mobile): if you double-tap any of the tabs, you'll be presented a context menu also containing "close all other tabs" and "bookmark all tabs" items – just like on a decent desktop browser. With these, mass operations with several open tabs become much faster than in other iOS Web browsers. A screenshot:
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