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First HDD MPEG4 Video Camcorder
An anonymous reader submits "This is a few weeks old but we have to talk about
this. Samsung introduced the world first hard disk drive based camcorder so you don't have to buy those MiniDV, Hi8s, and DVD-Rs. You take pictures, play MP3s, PAL+NTSC video! The picture quality is 350K so not a replacement for digital camera. The downside is the HDD size is 1.5 Gig so you can record video just over an hour! Why can't these bozos let us put a 40gig 2.5 IDE drive and let us record continuously for 25+ hours! Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?"
It's called "batteries" they power the camera. And often on consumer camcorders, they run out of power in an hour.
AC
Ah, but do not many modern portable MP3 players utilize hard drives? (up to 20 or 40 gigs even, I believe)
Most of those little digital video cameras overheat. Read the manual to pretty much any of them, they tell you that continuous operation for more than usually two hours will cause problems, possibly damage.
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I'm not sure here, but I'd guess part of the reason you aren't able to swap just any pc hard drive is to do with how well such drives would handle the movement of a camcorder. I know alot of people who's camcorders are subjected to a lot of sudden movements, if you subject a standard pc HD to that while fully spinning for an extended period of time, you'll kill the drive pretty fast. Most people are used to there media surviving more than a year. Standard HD's could well be killed of by wear and tear on the 7200rpm platters after only a year of spinning while being moved around by amateur shaky cam recording.
Archos Multimedia 20 with Camera attachement. About 400 bucks , does still and MP4 movies, you can get an adapter to read flash from your cameras, does firewire and both flavors of USB. What more do you want except Garmin to add in GPS!
Indeed I thought the same thing: Gee now I can carry a bunch of MiniDV cassets, each holding an hour of 25Mbps data (or 90000 Mb, or about 11.25GB), each costing some $4 or so, swapping to a new one whenever I'd like to effectively having a limited storage space, or I can use a volatile hard drive with a prescribed maximum limit (and to fit on a 1.5GB drive for an hour they must be using some extreme compression) that requires me to do a PC download once it's full. No thanks.
Another project that might intrest you is Mpeg4ip. This project includes tools to do realtime MPEG4 capture and conversion of other videos to MPEG4 format.
And last but not least is transcode, They just added support for realtime capture and conversion to this program so you can output in a number of diffrent formats, including MPEG4 via Divx5 or XviD.
Well, you should be interested in DVBackup, this project does what you need: backup data on your camcorder. You can stick gigs on a mini-DV !
This is the first? hmm... it reminds me a lot of the Hitachi MP-EG1 that I used a bit in the late 90's. It recorded full MPEG-1 video to its hard drive. (Although you only got about 20 mins as the hard drive was 260mb!)
Yes, some do like the IPod, but they are not immune to shocks though. Some (all?) models of the IPod have a 32mb buffer, quickly filled by most hard drives in a few seconds and will allow 20 minutes (+/- depending on encoding) of playback uninterrupted. During this time, the drive can spin down and the heads park so that it can sustain a considerable impact. When the drive is spinning and the head seaking, an impact can damage the drive either by a actual head collision with the platter or by damaging the voice coil that moves the heads.
Personally, I think that IPods are great for times when you want to listen to tunes at your desk, on a flight, in your car, etc. If I was going to work out or move around alot, I wouldn't want to bouce around with $500 hard drive. I'd much prefer something with solid state memory.
As a general rule atleast, you won't find mpeg compression on tape; although it could be done. As a general paradigm with tape every frame has all the information to generate the entire image. But mpeg compresses across frames (I know I'm simplifying the process). So if you take one of these tapes and stick it in a player and push play you'ld find it rewinding all over the place trying to grab enough information to play from where you left off. Yes I am aware that DV also uses compression but not across frames. Every image is compressed discreetly. And I'm also aware that dvds compress across frames. But again that is a different scenario.
Also remember 8mm tapes aren't designed to store digital video the same way DV is. You really should not be using them for archive purpose and expect them to be in a reasonable state when you check in on them in a few years time. Ofcourse they work but there is a reason you get a price break buying them instead of a dv cam.
The 2.5" drives in the laptops we get are all 4200 RPMs. I don't think that's fast enough to do video.
This is one of the reasons laptops all seem so damn slow.
The Hitachi MpegCam was the first hard-drive camcorder, as far as I know. (Though this Samsung probably is the first MPEG4 HDD camcorder). I used it back in high school in 1997 and 1998. It looked like a large electric shaver with a camera instead of a shaving head, and with an LCD in the back. The one I used had a 340mb PCMCIA hard drive in it and stored about 20 or 40 minutes of video, I think. The video wasn't quite VHS quality -- you could definitely see the difference, though it wasn't like matchbook-sized video. It also had a digital camera feature that took higher quality pictures (at least for that time).
It was really neat for what it was at the time, though it probably didn't fill any niche real well. It didn't have a lot of storage, nor did it take particularly high quality pictures. But it was really small, and was a lot of fun to play around on. I even did part of a movie for Spanish class on it.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
I was going to point out that the 20GB HDD in my iPod doesn't seem to have any problems, despite being dropped a few times, and slammed into doorways as I walked through with the iPod on my hip...
but then I remembered that the drive is usually not spinning. It only spins up when loading a new song (or songs) into its 32MB (?) of memory. The HDD on a camcorder would have to spin constantly when recording or playing back, but could spin down when either just viewing or even when taking pictures. With some cache memory, you could probably avoid the spin-up delay when starting to record. (i.e. data goes into cache until the HDD has spun up). Similarly, pictures could go in the cache until its full.
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I've been doing video editing (DV) on my powerbook's internal 60GB drive this weekend, and it's been just fine for me.
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Wouldn't a slight gyroscopic effect actually help someone with a cam corder keep it steadier? I think I'd be more worried about vibration than anything...
As others have pointed out, modern drive are pretty robust. The iPod only spins up when it's reading a song into memory, but even so it has to be able to handle someone jogging while that happens. I think personal music devices are going to have a lot worse motion issues than camcorders (where the desire is to hold it steady even if that is not what always happens...)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought it actually recorded video to MPEG4. If that were the case, 1.5 Gigs would be enough to store more than 4 hours of video. In fact it is only capable of MPEG4 playback.
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