The story of how Samsung fixed slow motion in 2015 just to ruin it again a few years later.
2013 was the year where the major smartphone vendors first set foot on HD 720p slow-motion (high-frame rate) video recording on their flagship devices.
In 2013, the Galaxy Note 3 first brought 1080p at 60fps for smoothness (encoded as real-time video), and both Apple and Samsung added 720p at 120fps, but there was a crucial difference between how Apple and Samsung did things:
Apple encoded their 720p@120fps video in real-time and with audio, where as Samsung encoded it at a slower rate than real-time and no audio.
The way Apple did it was superior for video editing and allowed for normal watching with audio. Apple even pre-installed a slow-motion editor that let the user select parts that are slow and parts that are in real-time:
Samsung thankfully did the same thing in 2015, with the Galaxy S6, and I was proud of it. I could not care less that Samsung was "copying Apple", I just care that it is an improvement. The S6 also brought its slow-motion video editor:
This gives the user the freedom to set their preferred playback speed in the video editor. It does not dictate that 1× playback speed is 1/4 or 1/8 or whichever other rate of real-life speed. 1× playback speed must match 1× real-life speed to clear up all confusion.
But at some point, Samsung reverted back to the inferior behaviour of slowing down the video file instead of letting the user decide the playback speed. The only improvement is that this time, it has a pitched-down audio track. Better than no audio track at all.
Side note: Yes, I know, the Samsung Omnia II from 2009 already had 240p at 120fps (no audio, not real-time), but the Galaxy S1, S2, Note 1, and S3 didn't (without modifications), and the S4 GT-i9505 initially had a bug where slow motion video would be recorded at a very low framerate, something like 15 fps instead of the expected 120 fps.
Posted in "General Topics" because I could not find a subforum for all Samsung devices, only for specific devices. I release this text under the Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.
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