It didn't take long after the introduction of cameras on phones to ask the question, "What about video?" Initially video recording was hampered by the limited space on phones as well as the hardware. It is one thing to snap a few JPEG files that might be a few hundred kilobytes each, but it is entirely another thing to take a video longer than a few seconds that doesn't add up to a pretty large file size. Furthermore, video has to be encoded and compressed, something that can be done in software, but is much better done in hardware.
When video recording did become practical, it changed the way we saw the world. Suddenly it was possible to have footage of news happening anywhere there was a cell phone – practically everywhere. Video recording became common place, so chances are good that there are very few handsets today that don't support it. In this project, we'll take a look at recording and playing video in our apps.