Hardware 3DS video record mode?

[ryan90]

A recent topic about 3d devices made me realize the 3ds camera feature could be exploited to record 3d videos either by Nintendo or by smart homebrew coders that is if the device ever gets hacked.

Homebrew coders enabled the iphone to record video before apple enabled it on there device from what i remember so surely its possible only question is if the specs are good enough to shoot 3d 640x480 video or at least 400x240.

3DS specs are :-
2x 266MHz ARM11 CPUs, a 133MHz GPU with 4MB of dedicated VRAM and 64MB RAM.

Thoughts???

I for one think it would be an amazing feature to be able to shoot 3d videos without having to shell out the money for a dedicated cam, and you could obviously watch them back on your 3ds

 

[DiscostewSM]

I would assume that if Pokemon Black and White, when played on a DSi, is capable of video chatting between 4 people local or 2 people WiFi, then I can't why the 3DS, being far superior in specs and such, couldn't do this. However, the game doesn't record anything, only captures and plays back, whereas recording of anything requires encoding and storage to hold it. Whether the 3DS, if recording video, can encode on the fly and store it fast enough on a SD card is questionable.

 

[pachura]

However, the game doesn't record anything, only captures and plays back, whereas recording of anything requires encoding and storage to hold it.

To send video over the net you definitively need to encode it.

ryan903ds camera feature could be exploited to record 3d videos either by Nintendo or by smart homebrew coders that is if the device ever gets hacked.

I would be really surprised if Nintendo did not exploit this possibility.

 

[DiscostewSM]

However, the game doesn't record anything, only captures and plays back, whereas recording of anything requires encoding and storage to hold it.

To send video over the net you definitively need to encode it.

I was talking specifically about recording yourself on your own DSi since that doesn't require encoding of itself, but you are correct when it comes to transmitting it locally or over the net. But, even with that, the process was so slow on the DSi, that it became more of a picture show to the recipient, which is why I also made mention of the process of encoding and storing "fast enough" in my post. I do hope they can pull something like that off.

 

[koji2009]

There are many "fast encode" codecs available, specifically those designed for mobile phones. If the 3DS really is a dual core 266mhz processor (remember, the ONLY document that states this specifically was a leaked document IGN got, this is by no means a solid confirmation) it would be possible to record 2 low resolution videos easily (400x240x2 easily within the realm of possibility, good enough to run on the 3ds, but way too low to run on any 3d HD tv) though depending on the codec it could cause a lot of blocking... not sure how much that would effect the 3d effect.

 

[ryan90]

There are many "fast encode" codecs available, specifically those designed for mobile phones. If the 3DS really is a dual core 266mhz processor (remember, the ONLY document that states this specifically was a leaked document IGN got, this is by no means a solid confirmation) it would be possible to record 2 low resolution videos easily (400x240x2 easily within the realm of possibility, good enough to run on the 3ds, but way too low to run on any 3d HD tv) though depending on the codec it could cause a lot of blocking... not sure how much that would effect the 3d effect.

I know mobile phone usually shoot in either 3gp or mp4, I don't know if there are any 3d versions of these codecs although i guess its just 2 videos being recorder together. It would look terrible on a 3dtv if it was only 400x240x2, but if they could shoot at 640x480x2 then it would surely look decent at the least depending on the lens quality, i can't say i thought the dsi had particularly good cameras tbh.

 

[DeMoN]

This reminds me of how the iPhone originally did not have video recording, but there were third-party apps that could do it.
It's definitely a possibility for the 3DS, but I'd be concerned about having enough processing power to do so and still retain a high quality 3D video. To be honest, if Nintendo did not mention it then I'm assuming it won't be included, becasue 3D video recording is a hell of a lot fancier than just 3D pictures.

 

[koji2009]

I think 640x480 would be completely unreasonable to believe in 3d with what we know of the 3ds' specs.

400x240x2@30fps is 5.8~ million pixels to have to worry about a second which is already fairly beefy for the portable system to handle. At 15fps it would be almost 3 million which is still a ton of throughput...

640x480x2@30 on the other hand... 18.5~. Even at 15fps that's still almost 10 million a second.

I guess you could do some interleaving... but you may as well either half resolution or framerate as you'd get about the same results without the annoying jittery action.

 

[epicCreations.or]

Do you mean the dual cameras? or the face camera? either possibility would personally be fine with me, but it would be pretty epic to playback 3D video on my 3DS without the need for a 200 dedicated camera (and an expensive 3D viewer on top of that!).

 

[ryan90]

I think 640x480 would be completely unreasonable to believe in 3d with what we know of the 3ds' specs.

640x480x2@30 on the other hand... 18.5~. Even at 15fps that's still almost 10 million a second.

I guess that is a lot of pixels to process, also i just realized that the 3ds microphone is inside the console so the only way to get un-muffled audio while recording would be to hold the 3ds open, you would need to do this anyway if you wanted a viewfinder. but doesn't the camera shoot in widescreen? they say the res is 640x480(4:3) but on the screen(16:10) theres no border, i guess it must be cropped?.

I don't have much information about how video is compressed but i know a high ram bandwidth is important which the ds has, certain video cards can also be a big help in encoding video so maybe the 3ds could use its gpu as well as the cpu's?. Where else would the 10million pixels a second affect the 3ds, it has 4mb of video ram which is enough to store ( 640x480*24bpp*2=1800kb or 1.8mb per frame) thats enough to process 2 frames in the gpu not that i know what the gpu could do with it.

*goes away to research video compression techniques and codecs

 

[DiscostewSM]

*Basically what ryan90 said about possible use of the GPU, if it is capable*

 

[pachura]

Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to abandon standard solutions (Tegra) in favor of proprietary one (Pica200) ? Most current SoCs (Tegra, Tegra 2, Snapdragon...) support H.264 720p decoding and encoding out of the box. Pica200's leaflet says nothing about such support, and its lack of programmable pixel shaders certainly won't help...

640x480x2@30 on the other hand... 18.5~. Even at 15fps that's still almost 10 million a second.

Well, they can for instance capture 640x480 but then downscale+crop it to the physical size of 3DS' screens just before encoding (2 x 400x240). But still, I think it might be too much for 3DS' hardware to encode on the fly.

 

[koji2009]

If you crop out the extra pixels, then you're recording at 400x240

As stated above the lack of programmable shaders means you won't be able to have GPU aiding in encoding if the GPU isn't specifically designed for it (And from Nintendo's point of view why would they need hardware assisted encoding?).

 

[pachura]

If you crop out the extra pixels, then you're recording at 400x240

Yes, but your field of view is much smaller (you get the "tele" effect). So it is better to capture 640x480, downscale it to 400x300, crop it to 400x240 and then encode it.

 

[dsfanatic5]

I thought about this concept when Nintendo first announced the ability to take pictures on the 3DS. As a huge fan of animation (stop-motion to be exact), I thought about being able to take a series of "still" 3D pictures, and cycle through them quick enough to create an animation. I think it depends on how much memory a single 3D picture takes up, and then if you multiply that by how many frames of animation, or video, then you could have a large file.

I think that with larger sdhc cards, and the right homebrew, it could be achieved. Capturing live video could be an issue, depending on whether you could get the camera to capture successive images fast enough to create a smooth video sequence. Stop-motion animation, however, seems like it could be an awesome possibility.

 

[koji2009]

dsfanatic: Video isn't saved by single images played in succession (at least every encoding besides MJPEG and UNCOMPRESSED) but rather as a (relatively) small amount of complete frames (key frames) and then a series of "what pixels have changed since last frame?".

So using single images multiplied over x amount of frames would be a bad way to estimate file size. The problem really has nothing to do with the maximum file output size but rather how much data can the 3DS can process... This has more to do with raw MHZ and memory bandwidth... Specifically in how it can handle real time processing and compression.

 

[playallday]

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[koji2009]

Ever try setting fraps to use it's own hard drive and dedicated CPU thread? Don't hurt near as bad this day and age.


As stated before, there are tons of light-weight codecs that can offer quite viewable experiences with fairly significant drops in video size versus uncompressed... Hell, even cheap-o cell-phones can take videos in such formats these days... Whether these codecs would be suited for 3d video however... that remains to be seen (artifacting could negatively impact the 3d depth effect possibly leading to nausea and disorientation)