

We fully expect to see these bumps ironed out soon, as the ability to stream live in full 360-degree panorama is a big draw of this new hardware. Those include issues juggling multiple YouTube accounts, and problems trying to share Gear VR streaming links via text message.

We took it for a spin using an early release of Samsung's Gear 360 software, and while the feature did work, it wasn't without a few hiccups here and there. New for this year's Gear 360 is the ability to live-stream footage over YouTube, Facebook, or Samsung's own Gear VR service. And while the situation seems improved compared to last year, both the phone and the Gear 360 itself can get a bit hot while transferring (and recompressing) files. Sending a one-minute video from the camera to a Galaxy S7 edge handset took over a minute and a half – and it's never good when transferring footage takes longer than originally recording it. This isn't helped by slow transfers from Gear 360 to phone. As a consequence, if you're looking for the best video quality and smallest file sizes (and you're shooting one-lens, so you don't need any post-processing stitching), you might just be better off pulling the Gear 360's microSD card and offloading your videos manually. But when saving that same video from the Gear 360 to a Galaxy phone, Samsung's app doubled the file size to 124MB while recompressing in H264. For instance, we recorded a short clip using just one of the Gear 360's lenses, resulting in a widescreen 1920 x 1080 H265 video, coming in at around 64MB. While that makes the videos easier to work with, it also greatly increases file size. Perhaps as a result, when you export videos through Samsung's Gear 360 app, they're transcoded to H264 for your phone.

Samsung gear 360 camera 2017 4k software#
In theory, that's a great move, but software support for H265 isn't nearly as widespread as the more popular H264. Samsung once again goes with high-efficiency H265 compression for recording Gear 360 videos.
