Cell phones video encoding

armcameracellphoneencodervideo

My question is, how are cell phones bale to produce on the fly video like mp4?
Are they using a hardware encoder chip?

Because most of them run on ARM chips? Are there ARM chips that can handle the encoding of the video on the software side?

If there are using hardware video encoders, what are they?
Are there hardware video encoders for the hardware enthusiast and diy to try and play with them?

Best Answer

They're usually using either pure hardware encoders or "hardware assisted" encoders (which do most of the computation but leave the final formatting as MP4 to software). The encoder is usually on the same chip as the ARM.

The ubiquitous Raspberry Pi is an example of this: the chip has two hardware camera inputs which go into the GPU. Once encoded, the data is streamed into memory accessible to the ARM.

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