I still see this problem! These frame drops suck. I am QUITE disappointed with Nokia after spending 500 euros on this device. I mean, I understand that it is "step 4 out of 5" and "work in progress" and all that but the price doesn't discount for these things, only the features do! THAT is the problem with this phone! This is so basic!

Before recording video, go to X-Term and kill some big processes:

killall gst-video-thumbnailerd
kill `ps | grep mafw-gst-renderer | grep -v grep | cat -d ' ' -f2`

It looks like you have some videos in your N900 and tracker actively works on it. That consumes memory and other resources and it may be a cause of frame drop etc.

EDIT: don't run system media player before you start recording.

PR1.2 may fix it - it has some bug fixes related with video.

EDIT2: unfortunately, it is a price of multi-tasking and universal device, it is very easy to produce a stable recording in single task environment but it is a nightmare for multitasking.

Nightmare with 1GB of application memory? The problem is the software for the N900 camera is no where near polished. Take a look at the video recording for example. There is no pause option and if you look at the first Generation N-Series, the pause option exists there! The photo Camera is also the same, the autofocus is no where near perfect and No night mode or touch focus or any smile detection.

I think those apps are still only half bake at most but I don't know when will Nokia bringing the sexy back to their most famous camera capability device of all time. The OS is still so new and no where near stage 5 yet. And after MeeGo announced, the work on the N900 is getting more challenging. Nokia has 3 OSes to work on at the moment. Expecting delay in application fix is also necessary when dealing with bugs and maintaining the OS.

I have to admit while I love my N900 the frame drops in the video recording is a huge disappointment.

And why cant we turn on flash while in video recording mode

For now just use Flashlight 2.0 or lfocus to turn on the flash while recording the video.

256MB. The rest is a swap space on internal flash memory (not very fast, BTW).

(I mostly agree with the rest but I like to say that Nokia is not Canon and can't beat it... at least now

So has anyone tested with PR1.2? Is the framedrop issue still there? I'm still waiting for PR1.2 update to appear on my device app manager.

Sample videos please.

For me it is actually worse with 1.2! Before I could get it to be almost smooth by overclocking and switching to offline mode, but not anymore.
That is a disappointment I must say. I do like the other changes 1.2 brings, but I was really hoping for improvement here.

Maybe it is specific to my situation though, did anyone else try yet?

I seem to have sorted out my dropped frames, bought a 4 gb class 6 microsd card and use that to save video. I guess it is due to file fragmentation with the onboard memory.

This one is working pretty good...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...SIN=B0013DXVYK