Bad audio when recording HD, D1, VGA

[bec]

As you may (not) know the sound quality, WHEN RECORDING, in all samsung symbians to date, has been vey low; namely 128 kb/s SAMR with 8khz.

SAMR is a very low quality codec, mainly used for voice recording but any backround noise, echo etc will cause garbled disturbing soud qualitu, especially @ 8khz.

Fortunately one of the earlyest videos on all ab symbian shows that HD video is 256 kb/s AAC @ 16Khz
All about symbian preiew March 26th '09
while D1 is still encoded with the bad quality SAMR (see for ypurself how bad there and on gsm arena).
Also the "camera trick" video that claims to be filmed with omnia HD also has a very good audio quality.

Unfortunately, the latest REVIEW by phone arena Is yet again plagued with SAMR encoding!
WHY SAMSUNG, WHY?

I can only hope they didn't have the latest firmware, OR that they'll update to decent encoding in the first firmware or else I won't get this so called "HD" phone!

[bec]

http://innovator.samsungmobile.com/bbs/ ... oardId=512

So now it's official...
I guess you'll just have to see what AMR means yourselves...

[soHD]

That's not good news at all. I hope it's not as bad in practice.

And there I was thinking the bad audio quality in the YouTube vids was down to the video compression when uploading vids...

[bec]

No, it's far worse. AMR encodes at ~12kb/s instead of 128 wich would be medium quality.
I've spoken with the admin on the samsung forum who's spoken with the sound dev team and the answer is that that's what they consider best for voice and cpu usage.

But all samsung symbian range uses that crappy encoding and we know for sure the cpu's they used so far were capable of much more. (see nokia for example: phones with same specs and decent audio)

Even one of the very first videos shows AAC @ 256 kb/s with 22 fps. And that with a raw unoptimised firmware.

Something isn't right and we should somehow raise awareness in the samsung headquarters; maybe if somone in a higher position hears of this issue they'll fix it at least in the Omnia HD.

[bec]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQrDwL7JJQM

This is how bat it actually is...

[warpfive]

Are we sure that is the phone, because ok the sound is awful there no disputing that but the fps at hd for so much action going on and picture quality given the darkness of the room and youtube compression is very impressive! I suppose the solution to this would be record the audio with some other device (actually do bluetooth head set work as recording audio and can they improve the audio?) and record video on the phone and match them up afterwards.

[bec]

Are we sure that is the phone, because ok the sound is awful there no disputing that but the fps at hd for so much action going on and picture quality given the darkness of the room and youtube compression is very impressive! I suppose the solution to this would be record the audio with some other device (actually do bluetooth head set work as recording audio and can they improve the audio?) and record video on the phone and match them up afterwards.

Recording with a separate device would never allow you to sync A/V right. Also why not just ger a camera then?

A bluetooth headset won't work either. The problem is the phone's firmware and it's up to them to fix it.

Even if good audio doesn't fit with the HD video (although it does, I'm sure of it!) it certainly could work in VGA and D1 recording modes.

[dol]

Have finally recorded a couple of videos in HD, first one was in the house and the audio was out of sync with the video, then last night I recorded some videos in a club, when played back this morning there is a horrible hiss which is very loud on all the recordings I made!!! Does this only happen in 720p?

The video recording is the last thing I have tested on this phone, I love everything else but this is unreal!!!

[bec]

It doesn't only happen in 720p it happens in all modes...
That's why I made this thread, to raise awareness and make samsung give us decent audio...
Unfortunateley I think it's hopeless...

[warpfive]

I'm getting a bit worried now that some people are reporting that the hd videos audio is out of sync, its bad enough that the quality might be very poor, but to have audio out of position as well makes it even worst. Can any one post a video demoing just how bad it is.

[jonnybruha]

If we hit a point where the i8910 is available almost anywhere and Samsung still hasn't addressed the issue, then I'll worry. Right now, there's no reason to believe they won't fix the issue unless they physically can't, which would be hard to believe with such an awesome processor. They've already said they're prioritizing the issue and until we DON'T hear something, all we can do is trust their word.

Oh, and the sync issue is only with certain media players. It plays back fine on Quicktime and on the phone itself.

[bec]

That's also annoying, I hate quicktime, it's slow and cumbersome...
Most decent players are working with literally anything BUT amr.(mplayer, vlc)

[Gerii]

KMPlayer can also play AMR and is faster than QuickTime.

[warpfive]

I think this video demonstrates just how good the camera is in terms of picture quality, capturing the action and frames per seconds but at the same time just show how bad and the reason why the audio is a problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHtbbQKsWpw

[dol]

Yup that is how most of my videos sound like, in 720p and lower. Seems to be fine with 1 or 2 people talking anything more or in a club / concert you can forget it. Can upload them to youtube if anybody wants to see them. Still shocking, record in HD video they said may as well have been HD silent video............. I still love the phone, video is its achilles heal at the moment.