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When it comes to cutting-edge features, the Chrome OS camera software isn’t exactly what comes to mind. While the entire experience received an overhaul a few years back, the camera we’ve had on Chromebooks has been largely the same for a while. It is functional, it technically works, but the camera hardware has never really been good enough to care that much about it.
With the rise in work/learn from home, however, more focus has been put on the Chromebook camera. While software updates can’t atone for the terrible sensors and lenses included in Chromebooks at the moment, software fixes can go a long way towards making the existing experience better from a functional standpoint. We’re tracking one such change that should be headed to Chrome OS soon: proper pause support while in video mode.
If you are unfamiliar, this feature is what has been available on smartphones for many years and gives users the ability to pause video capture on the fly to create a more seamless end product. That’s not a thing right now on your Chromebook, and yes, that’s a tad embarrassing to admit. A fix for this oversight is on the way and, as we speak, has already landed in the Chrome OS Developer channel. I stumbled across the commit for this new feature a bit ago and honestly just lost track of it. It seems the feature has now been merged and is already available without a flag or additional setting in the Developer Channel right now.
That version of Chrome OS is currently on 85, so we don’t expect this feature to roll out in Chrome OS 84 that is slated for release next week. Instead, we’d expect the pause button to head to the Chrome OS camera in roughly 7 weeks as Chrome OS 85 rolls out around September 1st. We think there are some other goodies finally ready for launch with this next version of Chrome OS, too, so we’ll get all of that together this week and let you know all the things we expect to see in the next week from the Chrome OS team.
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