For me, however, the most exciting new development is the implementation of video recording on the G1.  After the phone is updated a new app appears, “Camcorder.”  The use is fairly simple, just point and shoot.  There are two quality settings, “Low” and “High,” with the Low setting designated for “MMS” usage.  One nice feature is that video recording is integrated into the Camera app, and the user can switch from video recording to still photography with the click of one button.

The captured video uses the .3gp container format for the h.263 video codec.  Audio is labeled as “samr” and is the standard 3gp audo codec of AMR-Narrowband.  Using the “High” setting the video resolution is 352×288 and the bitrate looks to be around 350-400 kbps.  ”Low” has a resolution of 176×144 and bitrate around 200 kbps.

The Camcorder app allows for very easy video sharing with one-touch email, MMS, and YouTube integration.  The YouTube integration works very well, at least with the relatively small size video files I have tested with so far.

How does the video look?  Well, not great.  The camera on the G1 is not particularly good, and turning it into a video camcorder has not magically improved it.  That said, the video recording on mobile devices is generally not very good from a visual quality standpoint generally, at least with the current generation of in-device cameras.  Motion is pretty jerky, the colors are not great, and the audio quality, while in stereo which is nice, leaves a lot to be desired.  Still, the ability to capture video on the fly and get it uploaded to YouTube very, very easily has a lot of promise for the G1 and future Android phones.  The killer app may be, though, live streaming.  I am very hopeful that Qik can get implemented on the G1 sooner rather than later.  Broadcasting live has a number of great potential uses that rely far more on immediacy a mobile allows rather than the quality it cannot currently provide.

I have written a couple of previous posts about my experiences using the T-Mobile HTC G1 Android Google phone, including an in-depth look at how it handles video playback.  As a way to help other G1 users get video on to their phones, I put together this step-by-step guide to using the MeGUI application to encode video into a format that the G1 can play, while retaining as much quality as possible.  Because of the relatively low resolution of G1 compatible video, I have not focused as much on making the files as small in size as possible, but once you’ve mastered the basic steps outlined here, you should not have too much trouble tweaking the process to get smaller sizes if that is of importance to you.  With microSD cards getting cheaper and cheaper, I frankly have not found much need to really optimize encoding for size, but your needs may differ.

After basic installation of MeGUI and neroaacenc.exe, you will want to update MeGUI using the built in update function.  The application actually bundles a number of other apps, all of which are updated quite frequently, so it is always worth your while to make sure everything is as current as possible.  

After updating, also check to ensure that the neroaacenc executable is properly installed.

The key items to pay attention to for Android encodes are resize and crop. Set the first number (width) of resize to 480, and then let the program automatically set the resulting width while maintaining the proper aspect ratio. Then click the “crop” button and hit auto-crop. If there are any black borders to remove (which is very important when screen real estate is at a premium as on the Android) the program will figure it out automatically.
Once finished with resize and crop settings you will click “Save” which should pop up a preview window of what the new video will look like, and take you back to the original MeGUI interface page.

Step 1: Prepping the encode
After creating your AVS script, and assuming you have the G1-Android preset properly imported, then the only setting you need to look at now is output format, which needs to be set to “MP4.” If so, hit “Enqueue.”
At this stage you can also set up the audio encoding. Choose the original souce file for input, select the Nero AAC: NDAAC-LC 96kbps preset, make sure the audio output format is MP4-AAC, select a new name for the audio output file, and hit “Enqueue.”

Step 2: Encoding
Click the Queue tab, see that your audio and video encoding jobs are lined up properly, and hit “Start.”
One progress on both audio and video is finished, open up the Muxing/Muxing MP4 tool, and queue up the process of bringing together the audio and video streams into one MP4 file.

Once that job is finished, you should be all set to transfer the completed file to your Android phone. If you have a Video Player application installed from the Android Marketplace, you should be now watching high quality video on your Android.

MPEG-2 Sources
For MPEG-2 sources, there are additional steps. The first is the DG Indexer -> D2V creator.

Run your source file through the D2V creator. (You will have to Queue the process up and run it).

Afterwards you will have an audio stream for later encoding, while for video the AVS script creator will pop up using the D2V file you’ve created. For MPEG-2 sources you will most likely want to de-interlace the video, so that will be set at this stage as well.
Go to the Filters tab of the AVS script creator and click “Analyze.”

It will take a little while for the analysis process to complete, but at the end you if you are in need of it, the “Deinterlace button” will be automatically clicked for you. At this point you can go back to the main AVS script creator page and move ahead in the encoding process normally, as described above. When it comes time to set the encoding processes from the main MeGUI interface, choose the audio stream that was established by the D2V creation process to be encoded into AAC audio.