[Xiaomi Redmi 2 Guides, News, & Discussion] b1h:
So you want to record more natural looking videos on your Redmi 2? Maybe so you get more headroom when video editing? Or does recording in low light look too choppy? Then this might be for you!

After reading Redmi 2 on XDA and checking out FreeDCam, I can say that it’s the best looking video recorder I’ve tried on my phone.

Of course you want to see some samples (Sorry if the samples aren’t that great but there weren’t any colourful flowers around. :o)

YouTube samples

Outside and sunny...

CM Snap

[YOUTUBE]5FQgGmXo3u0[/YOUTUBE]

FreeDCam

[YOUTUBE]KSdj3vIXNec[/YOUTUBE]

Outside...

CyanogenMod Snap

[YOUTUBE]HVHoFGCzJ4c[/YOUTUBE]

FreeDCam

[YOUTUBE]TMJfc67WtrQ[/YOUTUBE]

FreeDCam with some adjustments

[YOUTUBE]4oksPdfF59o[/YOUTUBE]

Low light with workaround

CyanogenMod Snap

[YOUTUBE]sxibsakkHvY[/YOUTUBE]

FreeDCam

[YOUTUBE]oEQgmhT9JQ0[/YOUTUBE]

This camera app will give you more manual controls than any other video recording app plus, you can even change them while recording! Here’s some specific settings that you should change…

Exposure:

Adjust so nothing looks too dark or too bright (find the balance).

Contrast:

Change to 0 (or something slightly higher). I guess the problem with other apps is that the contrast is set too high and makes shadows look too dark and highlights look too bright.

Sharpness:

Set to 0 as the video will look more soft and natural. Sharpening after recording (i.e. using a program) seems to look better…

Denoise:

Turn off as colours get washed out and we start to lose some of that detail. (Or keep it on if you really hate noise.)

There’s some issues regarding focussing, manual focus doesn’t seem to work. If you want to set your focus to infinity, after launching the app, set the focus to auto, tap to focus once and then set your focus to infinity.

Ok great now I can record better videos! But at night the video looks blurry, choppy…

The reason why this happens is so that more light can enter the camera for longer, causing the video to look blurry, choppy and noisy. Here is a workaround where you can now record at a constant 30fps even in the dark! This idea came from some OnePlus thread where you could rename a front camera video binary file to the rear camera video binary as the front camera records at a constant 30fps. Be aware there is a trade-off and it is that dark places won’t be as bright at 30fps compared to 15fps!

If you don’t do this, then 15fps could actually be helpful as you can see more with less light! FreeDCam will help a lot with a low light situation with the increased exposure and decreased contrast. You’ll get more noise though. You can either activate the denoiser and/or run a denoiser plugin after you have recorded your video.

(Note: I’m not responsible for anything that might happen on your phone. I’ve only tested this on cm13 so the files might be different across different roms.) ;)

Note that this mod will affect all apps that record video and dark places will look very dark.

Go to /vendor/lib/

Copy the name libchromatix_ov8865_sunny_default_video.so and then back it up (rename it to something like libchromatix_ov8865_sunny_default_video.so1

Create a copy of libchromatix_ov2680_5987fhq_default_video.so and rename it to libchromatix_ov8865_sunny_default_video.so

To revert change libchromatix_ov8865_sunny_default_video.so1 back to libchromatix_ov8865_sunny_default_video.so

Increase bitrate…

You can increase the video bitrate with FreeDCam (or any other video recording app if you mess with media_profile.xml) so you can record all that fine detail (including especially the noise). Here, we’ll change the bitrate to 40Mbps.

Just head to /system/etc/media_profiles.xml and look for: (tip: near the end)

Change maxBitRate to 40000000 and save. This edit only tells the phone the maximum bitrate it can encode at.

In FreeDCam, make sure you’re in 1080p! Change video bitrate to 40000000 and audio bitrate 320000. Be aware that the video size will now be around 300MB/min so make sure you have plenty of storage. (I tried using an USB OTG Drive. It works! But the USB device interfered with the microphones and created noise. :()

So yeah. The difference might not be that noticeable to some, but to me, it looks a lot better to me. While recording, the viewfinder might lag a bit but in the actual recorded video, it’ll be fine. I might put more samples up or maybe you try this out and get some samples for me! Hopefully there are some people here who are interested in video. :good:

My first thread :)