How-to Enable 720p HD Video Recording on iPhone 3GS

Today you will learn for this tutorial how to enable the ability to shoot videos in 720p even on an iPhone 3GS. We all know that iPhone 3GS doesn’t have the same camera/same sensor like the iPhone 4 so theoretically, iPhone 3GS would not have the ability to shoot in 720p HD format in any way, but the hardware chip from the iPhone 3GS would be capable of something like this, so is worthwhile. The tutorial only works on iOS 4.1 so please do not try it on other terminals.

Please create backup for these files to your computer before making changes.

Steps How-to Enable 720p HD Video Recording on iPhone 3GS:

1. Connecting the phone to PC, open ifunbox, connect to your system files on the phone and navigate to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Celestial.framework/N88/AVCapture.plist;
2. In this folder you will copy to your computer and open this file: AVCaptureMode_AudioVideoRecording: Change the “Capture” key. Set 1080 for the height and set 800 for the width value. These values will control the dimensions of the encoded videos;
3. In the same file you will change the key values of “Preview” where you set the height value at 320 and width value of 440. This value controls the preview clips on the screen;
4. In the same file you will change the “Sensor” key where you set values for height of 1080 and width value of 1920. This setting forces the phone to use the entire sensor camera;
5. In the same file you will change the values for average encoding bitrate to 20 million which will increase the video file size, meaning every second of filming will take approximately 2 MB;
6. In the same file you will change the values for the encoding bitrate at 40 million but at least quantizer from 19 to 15;
7. In the same file you will change the values for H.264 from 3_1 to 3_0;
8. Once done, close the file and copy it back to the phone.
9. Now you will copy to your PC and open the MediaValidator.plist and CameraRollValidator.plist files, where you make the following changes: at VideoMaxPixelsPerFrame key, set the value of 128,000 and at the MaxLevel key change its value from 30 to 31;
10. After you have edited these two files you can copy them back into the phone;
11. Now navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/ → copy the N88AP.plist file to your computer and make the following modification: Right in the middle of the Capabilities key you will need to add the following lines of code just before </dict>

<key>720p</key>
<true/>
<key>hd-video-capture</key>
<true/>

After that reset the terminal and you should be able to shoot videos in 720p format.

Here is the sample of video record in 720p HD on iPhone 3GS: