Nobody wrote the driver for H.264 HW encoder support, yet. When that happens, Pinephone will be capable of that, too.
That's not a $200 proposition, though. :)
And I guess there's no huge motivation, given the expected quality of the resulting image. Maybe someone will write it for some other similar AW SoC that uses the same HW block.
If it's beta software and prototype hardware then they should be in the 'give it to some people willing to help with bugs and documentation' phase, not 'charge people for a phone that can't make phone calls' phase.
I used to be all for early adoption, but too many people ran off with my money via Kickstarter and Steam Early Access.
> If it's beta software and prototype hardware then they should be in the 'give it to some people willing to help with bugs and documentation' phase, not 'charge people for a phone that can't make phone calls' phase.
It can make phone calls.
It took a separate $31,000 kickstarter and 4 years of a multi-vendor cooperation to create and upstream then non-existent accelerated stateless video decoding API for Linux. Pine64 would have never released anything if they waited on Linux API standardization process (have multiple users of the API in kernel, etc.). And even after 2 years of availability, the only major user of the API is gstreamer, and it's still bubbling through the stack so that you can just open Firefox and play an accelerated video.
Pushing through this process even nicher accelerated encoding feature, usable pretty much only for the cameras (which are quite crappy on the OG pinephone, so motivation is already low, there), is just not going to happen for giving someone a 7 year old outdated phone worth $150 only to some enthusiasts and $0 to pretty much everyone else, lol. That's just ridiculous.
Your $5 bargain bin webcam doesn't work without the computer and the software that runs on it though. The PinePhone isn't the problem, the problem is the lack of software. It is ridiculous to compare the two things.
I’d expect my PinePhone to come with software too. I mean, I guess it did, I think I just expected more from the open source community than from the nameless fly-by-night vendor.
Are you sure it does and isn't just the bog-standard generic driver for your OS? Because likewise, you provided the computer, OS and everything else for it to work with.
That's not a $200 proposition, though. :)
And I guess there's no huge motivation, given the expected quality of the resulting image. Maybe someone will write it for some other similar AW SoC that uses the same HW block.
Such is the power of FOSS.