The Palm Pre launched with only a dozen apps in the App Catalog, since than, we have 97 apps in there. But for those that want to spice it up a little, well, there’s always homebrew. Homebrew apps went over a million downloads back in the first week of September.

By now, the homebrew apps have over two million downloads, which is quite an achievement. That is about one million downloads in less than a month. And, at time of this post, there are only 246 apps in the Precentral Homebrew App Gallery so far. Lets not forget that a few of those homebrew apps have already graduated to the App Catalog.

Translator and gDial Pro are the ones that I have been using since they started as homebrew apps. There is another homebrew app that I been using since it started; MyNotification, which lets me use any sound for my notifications instead of the official one. But unfortunately it isn’t in the App Catalog just yet. Congratulations and thanks, are in order, for everyone that made all this possible.

The other day, I noticed the PreCentral that someone has hacked the Palm Pre to shoot videos.  Well, it took me awhile to follow the directions but I finally got it working.

Beauty of open source, when you make something open source, you get all these hackers flocking to make free apps.  This video hack example proves how quickly the open source community can develop programs. (faster than Palm development team!)

The video right now does 320×240 pixel only and there’s no sound but I am finding that the video feature is a cool add-on until Palm developers make it part of their default apps.  And certainly, this video hack proves that video will be added on to the Pre in the near future.

Here’s step-by-step instructions for computer-dummies so you can enable this cool video feature.

1) Download video-cam-test.zip here.  (via PreCentral Forum)  Unzip it of course.

2) Download both WebOSDoctor(Sprint or Bell), download WebOSQuickInstall from PreCentral and put them in the same directory like this:

*NOTE: If you don’t have Java installed, you will need to install it, just goto Java.com to install.  If you can run WebOSQuickInstall.jar, you have Java installed so…

3) Click on WebOSQuickInstall.jar and it should automatically install any files needed. (for the first time)

4)  Then connect your Palm to your computer via a USB cable.

5) Then click on the “+” button on your WebOSQuickInstall program and select both ca.canucksoftware.videocam_0.1.1_all.ipk and com.canucksoftware.videorectest_1.0.0_all.ipk.

6) Now, click on “Install!” and it should install on your Palm Pre.

7) Reboot (Power OFF and ON) your Palm Pre.

You should see new app like this:  (Press IT!)

9) Hit the “ON” button on your Pre.

10) Hit “Start Rec” to start recording and “Stop Rec” to stop.

11) Now, this app doesn’t actually show you the video itself while its recording so you will simply have to shoot your Pre. (somewhere…)

12) To re-play your videos, you will need to transfer the MP4 files to your computer.

To do this, connect your Pre to your computer via USB cable and choose “USB Drive” option.

13) Browse your Palm on your computer and you should see MP4 files in the root directory such as “09_29_09_04_48_20.mp4″ which is basically timestamp for your videos.

14) Copy the MP4 videos over to your computer and either use SMPlayer to view the videos or upload to YouTube.

*NOTE – I found that the portable SMPlayer works the best, don’t use the install version, I haven’t got those to work.

Enjoy~

FULL VIDEO Step-by-Step directions on how to install the video hack on your Palm Pre for computer dummies:

Test videos I made:

My first video with Palm Pre in front of mirror:

My second using whiteboard:

My third while at Fishermen’s Wharf: