The Nexus 4 was supposed to be the top of the line device for Google to showcase Android 4.2 on. The Nexus 4 is also the little brother of the LG Optimus G. It basically has all the same specs as the Optimus G except it has the 8MP shooter instead of the 13MP that the Sprint variant has. Now the camera isn’t horrible, but it could be better. Thanks to some of the geniuses at XDA we’ve got a way to improve the quality on the Nexus 4. All you have to do is change some code in the files and you’ll need root access to get this accomplished. Here’s the instructions from XDA:
- Using a file browser (like root explorer/es file explorer etc) go to the /system/etc folder
- Make sure your system is mounted RW
- Search for the media_profiles.xml file and open it up in any text editor
- Once you scroll down you will see the following:
<EncoderProfile quality=”1080p” fileFormat=”mp4″ duration=”30″>
<Video codec=”h264″
bitRate=”12000000″
width=”1920″
height=”1080″
frameRate=”30″ />
<Audio codec=”aac”
bitRate=”96000″
sampleRate=”48000″
channels=”1″ />
</EncoderProfile>
- Change the bitRate from 12000000 to 20000000
- Save and reboot.
This little change will give you 20Mbit encoding instead of the 12Mbit encoding that it has set by default. But as expected it does make the video files much larger. Which could be a problem if you have the 8GB Nexus 4. So you’ll want to take the video and upload it to Dropbox or even Google+ then delete it from your device so you don’t run out of room. With Google+’s new update you can upload pictures in their original size and not have them resized like before, which is a great thing.
If you don’t want to try out the method above, you can also try lgCamera and it will let you change the bitrate without rooting. You can find that link down below as well.
So who’s gonna try this out on their Nexus 4? If you do check it out, let us know in the comments how it works out for you.