iPhone Video Recorder - Free Video Recording on your iPhone!

Finally we have a decent video recorder for the iPhone ingenuously named ‘iPhone Video Recorder‘ by Dreamcatcher allowing up to 320 x 416 video resolution recording with 128kbps sound recording in mp4 format albeit only 15fps. Now, iPhone Video Recorder isn’t the first video app that has been available for the iPhone. An app called ‘Showtime’ has been available for a while but it wasn’t exactly fully featured and only allowed a 4 second record time unless you paid for the full version.

iPhone Video Recorder however only allows a 30 second record time (enough for most people) with the demo version. By purchasing the full version however, you get permanent free upgrades to future versions and there is no restrictions on record times - it just keeps going until your iPhone runs out of space. And with a 1 hour recording file as small as 60MB (depending on settings) you could record over 100 hours of video on your 8GB iPhone!
To install iPhone Video Recorder to your iPhone, go into the Installer and add the source:

http://www.iphonevideorecorder.com/install

After it has refreshed your installer sources, you will find iPhone Video Recorder in the Multimedia category from where you can install it. Once it is installed, you will find the Video Recorder icon on your home screen.

Due to the processing power needed to record video on the iPhone, as standard the app records the video but doesn’t encode the file into a mp4 video file until straight after the recording has finished. You can within the options choose for the app to encode the video as it is recording but the much lower video quality this causes is obvious. Now, as standard, the app is set to auto-encode after a recording which does take some time and whilst it is encoding you cannot record another video (unless you stop the encoding taking place) so what I found worked best was to turn off auto encoding. This way I can record video after video when I need to and can just get the app to encode the files later.

Clicking on any video in the recordings list lets you play the video, share it by either uploading to YouTube or by e-mailing the mp4 file. You can also easily rename or delete the file from there.

In the settings, you have the ability to adjust picture brightness brightness and amplify sound levels. You can also toggle Image quality within the settings. The better the quality settings, the bigger the file size and longer the encoding will take. In our test recording at best video settings and 64kbps audio settings, a 28 second file took exactly 2 minutes to encode and left us with a 2.3MB mp4 file. A 28 second video with lowest video settings (same 64kbps audio) however took 1 min 40 seconds to encode and left us with a 403kb file although the picture was very blocky. Considering the small time difference in encoding time, I think we will stick with it left at the best quality settings.

All in all, a great app… perfect as it is if you only record short clips but it you want the ability to record longer clips, then register within the app to get full functionality. Well worth the money!

Rating: 5 out of 5