It looks like native video recording from your Chromebook’s webcam is finally coming to Chrome OS. A new commit in the Chrome Review Gerrit points to support for video recording so long as the device is using the MediaRecorder APIs found in the platform.
We are implementing recording functionality in chrome camera app on ChromeOS devices with MediaRecorder APIs. Enabling HW VEA would greatly improve the performance. For example, FPS increases from 7 to 30 on kevin.
For reference, the device name Kevin is the Samsung Chromebook Pro.
It is great news as native video recording from the webcam has been a long standing request for Chromebook users. There have been workaround available through extensions and web apps but the frame rate has been low and overall quality less than ideal.
It is rumored that the upcoming new Samsung Chrome OS device, codenamed Nautilus, will have this feature out-of-the-box and it was assume that it would be the only device that had it. Now, with this comment in the commit, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
When, or if, we will see this native video recording hit your existing Chromebook is anyone’s guess. It likely will be the next dev channel release which means its likely a few months away at best from hitting the stable channel.
