Samsung Galaxy S II gets 1080p 24 Mbit/s recording hack [Updated]

Samsung’s Galaxy S II has been coaxed into recording higher-quality video than the 1080p Full HD it supports out of the box, with a modder better known for his work on Symbian cameras turning his attention to the Android smartphone. hyperX added continuous auto-focus and 720p 30fps recording to the Nokia N8 back in 2010, but has now persuaded the GSII’s 8-megapixel camera to record 24 Mbit/s 1080p at 30fps complete with 44.1khz 192-bit audio.

We weren’t exactly underwhelmed when we saw the 1080p HD video the Galaxy S II is capable of, so this improvement in quality is even more welcome. Natively the Samsung records roughly 16Mbit/s 1080p HD, spitting out MP4 files using the H.264 codec with AAC mono audio.

The mono limitation is still present – that’s down to the single microphone, of course, and software hacks can’t exactly grow the Galaxy S II another one of those AnonymousCoward points out that the GSII does have a second microphone, but right now it’s not being implemented – but otherwise this is the sort of hack that we expected excitable Samsung owners to come up with. Unfortunately there’s no public release of the mod, so we’ll have to wait for hyperX to polish it up before we can try it out ourselves.

Update: While we wait, xda-developers member Potatoman tells us that his GSII camera mod is already available. It doesn’t tinker with the video bitrate – Potatoman reckons he didn’t see enough quality improvement to warrant the increase in file size – but it does boost audio quality to 192kbps/44.1Khz quality from the standard 64kbps/16khz. You can download it here.