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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)?"
I'm sure someone will figure a way to replace the internal drive with a larger one, as they did the first TiVo's.
It's called "batteries" they power the camera. And often on consumer camcorders, they run out of power in an hour.
AC
My Sony Digital 8 Handycam can store 60 minutes of video on a standard 8mm or Hi-8mm tape. Now, forgive me if my math is wrong, but I know that approximately 4 gigs of hard drive space is used when I download approximately 20 minutes of video (it's actually 18, but for my calculuations, 20 is easier). I'm assuming this means that around 12 gigs of data can be stored on an 8mm tape. If I could get a camcorder that would store MPEG-4 video on an 8mm tape, I could store around 8 hours of video on a single 8mm tape.
The advantage that I see to using tape, is that I can easily archive and store the video. If I have to backup my video from a hard drive on the camcorder to a hard drive on my system, I will be quickly running out of room. Yes, I could back it up to CD or DVD (if I had a DVD burner), but that's extra work I don't want to have to deal with.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
But yeah, never attribute to "the cold hard facts" what you can more easily attribute to a vast conspiracy theory. Absolutely.
It might be nice to have 25+ hours of recording capability, but try finding a battery that will let you do that. You're gonna have to swap batteries or plug in for extended use (or carry around one huge battery for that).
I'd also be concerned about file size limitations... if grandma and grandpa get one of these and try to transfer the file to a machine running win me or something, you don't want them to deal with the 2 GB file size limitations, etc...
Otherwise, yes, 25 hours of recording time may be useful... but is worth recording with a camcorder for 25 hours?
As someone else mentioned already for this article, because they are handheld. Hard drives usually don't like to be moved/impacted/bumped around when they are running.
Is the IBM MicroDrive still around?
yes they are.
they have 2 problems....
1 - horribly expensive.. I can buy a CF card of the same size for less than 1/2 the price of a microdrive.
2 - horribly delicate.. pick up the microdrive and lightly pinch it... Oops.. it's dead now.
we used to use microdrives here for some data recording... we went through 10 of them in 3 months.. while the CF cards dont fail.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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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Play Six Pack Man. I
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!
3 Responses:
1. iPod
2. iPod
3. iPod
What's the use of a tiny camcorder if you can't use it?
... the camera were a small wireless capture device and the recording device could be left on your belt or in a bag with it's own monster batteries? Hell it could be your laptop.
That way the device in your hand has no moving parts, cost less and it would be easy to upgrade the storage separately.
Jukebox Multimedia 20 Handheld Entertainment Center USB 1.1 20GB Hard Disk+MP3+MPEG 4
1.3 Megapixel Camera, MP4 Video Camcorder
Specs
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
25 hours of boring holiday footage.
I would like to see Apple team up with a camcorder manufacturer (e.g. Sony) and build a camcorder into the iPod. Seems like the next natural step to me.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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!)
I don't think the normal IDE PC HD would work as well as you imagine in something like a digital camcorder. If you've ever watched a video that any female has made ever you'll notice the camera bounces around more than a kangaroo in a crappy B-movie. All that wear and tear would kill a normal HD, so they have to make tougher ones, which are more expensive, yadda yadda yadda
~ now you know
Personally, I'd love one. I currently own a Sony PC9e miniDV thingy, and it's excellent. This look better though. An annoyance I have is the capture time - basically, it dumps camcorder footage out to the firewire port at x1 speed. This device would overcome the 1x playback limitation. As the article says, it would also stop me getting through tapes at an ungodly speed. Plus there's the benefit that each clip has already been stored seperately, so no more sitting at the editing software checking the results of basic imports.
Isn't anyone pleased to see this except me? Lighten up! This thing is cool.
Cheers,
Ian
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.
This whole "the batteries wouldn't last long enough if the HD could store more" doesn't fly. ACCE$$ORIE$. They want you to buy as much crap as possible, so they therefore want you to buy batteries. Back in the day we had a VHS camcorder (one of those big honkers) and we kept 3 batteries around for it. What if you are taping and you need more time? Swap the tape and battery when needed, and keep going. It's that simple. If you had more HD space in this and the battery went dead, you could just throw another battery on it. No biggie. My guess is that they don't want to compete too much with their old inventory. Kind of like the recent "HP: we're-not-going-to-benchmark-the-alpha-if-it's-fas ter-than-the-Itanium's-we're-selling" deal. I didn't read the article, but it seems reasonable. They have other camcorders that have about this time limit to them and they don't want to be stuck with them. If they release a 20 hour model, who is going to buy the other 2 million 1.5 hour models sitting in the warehouse?
Corporations are in competition, but sometimes I think they don't want to set the bar too high, else they will have problems reaching it on the next new product run. I think these corps don't want to do the best thing they can, they just want to do better than the other guy.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
I believe you maybe mistaken. Just checking on Amazon.com the cheapest 1GB Microdrive is $299.88. While the cheapest 1GB compact flash card is $564.99. Sure you'll be able to get them cheaper if you shop around but for the moment at least the microdrive is significantly cheaper than Compact Flash.
In my personal experience microdrives are tough enough. I've dropped my microdrive twice and it has survived perfectly well. But you do of course have to take care of them just like any electronic equipment. But they are certianly not as delicate as you suggest.
Glad to hear they're living up to the illustrious reputation of their predecessor then...
Cheers,
Ian
Don't you see: this should be called the pr0n-camera. The mpeg4 compression means it's ready to be posted to the website without recompression, and the recording time is ... just about standard for a "feature". Anyway, now that I'm getting older, it's more time than I would need.
The iPod is, by all practical means, only a HD.
The microcontroller and the display don't use much space or power. The only thing which adds to size and weight is the accumulator.
Cameras sport things like lenses, sensors, and a real display, which need more space, and they need a lot more processing power (especially
, when encoding in MPEG4), which in turn require more space for the energy storage.
> What's the use of a tiny camcorder if you can't use it?
Admittly, the use is quite limited. When you want a tiny, fast copyable and computer-editable video, go for it. When you want to record more than 1h of video without pit stop at a PC, buy yourself some other device.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?
Of course there's a conspiracy to limit recording time. If you could record for an hour and a half or more then someone might carry one into a movie theater and record it. Therefore the public is not allowed to own a device with that capability. Any manufacture who sells one is guilty of contributory infringement.
Welcome to hell. It may be a bit warm here, but there's plenty of music and movies for sale.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Samsung is not a hacker-friendly corporation like TiVo. If anything you'd get slapped with DMCA suit if you "upgrade" the drive.
Also, I don't think this is a consumer-grade HDD. There is no mention of the type in the official press release, and arising out of the fact that none of the current HDD mfg's make anything near 1.5gb capacity drives, I'm willing to guess: this is a proprietary model.
If only there was some way to make the batteries removable. I mean, I'm getting tired of returning my digital camera to the Kodak service department every time the batteries run out.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Good point.
Hey I know, why not just take two peopl in with one camera each and tag team the movie recording?
Heck, the movies are SHOWN with multiple reels, why shouldn't the pirates STEAL them in multiple reels?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
I've been doing video editing (DV) on my powerbook's internal 60GB drive this weekend, and it's been just fine for me.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
I think most CE (Consumer Electronic) companies are very concerned about the "price point." And basically will do anything that will save them $$ and because everything has a mark-up of 1x or 2x or 4x (or more) when it gets to retail, they really try to keep teh price low..
Of course they should learn to make the things modular.. But that is not yet something within their "ken."
http://www.hawknest.com/
I bought mine off of Best Buys web site for $400 including the camera module, media modules. They shipped free to my house. Lovely device and easy to use. Picture quality isn't so good in dim lighting but 1.3M pixel still pics outside are great. MPEG4 Video playback on my TV is really good, recorded video from camer module is OK (frame rate is not as fast as I'd like), MP3's sound awesome, etc. Now I'm just waiting for the video feed MPEG hardware recorder module to come out.
It's almost there. What I'd buy,if they'd build it, is a full featured DV camcorder, but with the tape mechanism replaced by a HDD. Standard DV tapes hold 11GB. A readily available 60GB drive would hold 5+ hours of high quality video with CD quality audio. The current HDD's would take up less space than a DV tape and assorted mechanisms.
With firewire you could then extract the video, either temporarily archiving on a larger disk in your PC, or dump to DVD-R's as either MPEG2, or as raw files for editing later.
For the people who complained that there's no need for longer recoding capacity than you batteries last: you're wrong. With non-removable storage you'd want to have the capacity to last until you get to a place where you could dump the contents. A weekend trip might involve several battery changes / recharges before returning to a place where you could empty the camera.
There might be a small "consipiracy" against this sort of camcorder as it would not consume tapes, but then many of the camcorder manufacturers aren't selling blank tapes. Sony likes making things that use odd or new media to get the media sales later, but not all manufacturers are in that position.
One last comment, Hitachi brought out it's MPEG-Cam years ago. It recorded MPEG-1 onto a PCMCIA hard drive that was smaller than many of the CF cards we use today. It was a little more bulky than a point and shoot still camera, but smaller than a compact camcorder. Of course it didn't have the stuff that modern camcorders have today like large zoom, image stabilization or firewire output.
But haven't you noticed that there is also a conflicting conspiracy to lower the average length of a movie to less than an hour and a half?
Looking at a list of recent releases I see very few that are in the triple digits of minutes (One weekend I was shocked that no movie was more than 99 minutes long).
Yet what's the price for that movie? Oh yeah, it's still the same $8/$9/$10 you pay for a three hour moviethon like Lord of the Rings.
Check it out yourself if you don't believe me. I think studios are realizing any footage beyond an hour and a half would be best used as filler to boost sales of their DVDs. I don't doubt that within a couple years it will be the very rare exception for a movie to be longer than an hour and a half, and some will be barely over an hour.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Apples iPods have up to 20GB HDs in them, and should take at least as much a beating as in a camcorder.
Many people have responded to this article discussing the practicality of including or installing a HD larger than 1.5 Gb in a device like this. Most have expressed doubt concerning the reliability as well as the gyroscopic effect.
So, my question is, if I can go jogging with a 20 Gb iPod, why can't I shoot video with a 20 Gb "iCam?"
Gosh, wouldn't it completely suck ass to be stuck with some idiot format that can't decide which one it wants to be, so it applies the same name to all of them, even though that they represent entirely different standards?
Wouldn't it suck even harder if you had to pay licensing fees to put that video that you shot using the camera you bought onto the webspace that you've paid for, and then be lost as to which standard they meant when they said 'MPEG-4?'
This is, of course, just the beginning. Wait until you have to pay them a licensing fee to convert one MPEG-4 format to another MPEG-4 format. Wait and see. Don't forget the most fun part... Licensing terms for MPEG-4 haven't even been set yet. It should be fun when Samsung sends you another bill.
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.Org Foundation
IBM makes a 1GB microdrive for about $250, and toshiba makes a 5 GB type 2 PCMCIA hard drive for about $150. I would guess a variant of one of these is on the inside of this camcorder. What I don't understand is why they wouldn't make it removable? It couldn't add more than $20 to what is already likely to be a very expensive toy. I also don't understand how a hard drive is better than a digital tape.
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.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
I still recall my grandpa's first video camera, it was like you describe (except it wasn't wireless): the capture device (the camera itself) was tethered to a VCR. When camcorders first came out, where you could put the tape inside the camera, we were all amazed by this new breakthrough, no more lugging your VCR around to take videos. Of course it was much bulkier than my grandpa's video camera, but the convience of having everything in one box outweighed the extra size of the camcorder. I'm sure having seperate camera and recorder now would be less of a hassle, they would be much smaller, but I'm still not sure it would be desirable to have two seperate parts to keep track of.
Encrypting the signal after you do device handshaking/negotiation is easy.
How do you handle device handshaking/negotiation? You have 2 of these wireless harddrives for recording (and your neighbor has 1 too...). How does the camera decide which receiver to send to? I'll accept that it is easy to do excryption after that... (that's fairly well understood for most internet crypto stuff). But how does this stuff decide who the proper recipient is? How do you switch from one receiving harddrive to another when the first fills up? Without accidentally sending it to your neighbor's unit?
This has to be easy enough a normal consumer to handle. No keying in a 32-digit serial number for the receiver into the transmitter. As close to automatic as possible. Press a button on both simultaneously to synch them, maybe.
Remember, this is no longer a geek toy. This is consumer electronics... it needs to "just work". Easy. Simple. And without having your bedroom home movies show up on your neighbor's tv.
You're hitting the problem with wireless security... secure *or* convenient... both together... that's very difficult.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Uncompressed DV-format video takes up 3.5 mb/sec. That's about 12.6 gigs/hour. The DVD-Rs used in camcorders aren't normally full-size -- in fact, they're only 2.8 gigabytes. So now we're looking at 4:1 compression, which is about what one gets when compressing to MPEG. So 1/4 the space at 1/4 the size gives us about the same as we started: one hour.
One might ask why DVD-R palmcorders don't use full-size DVDs. There are two reasons for that. The first is spin stability. Torque being equal to the cross-product of force and distance from axis of rotation, a larger disc radius means much greater stability problems. Back in the days before 4 MB CD-R buffers, you might've noticed that your CD-R drive was much less shock-resistant when burning the last half of the disc rather than the first half (or the other way around, I don't quite remember how it was). CD-Rs burn from the inside-out (or vice versa, like I said, I just can't remember right now). When the CD-R gets to burning the outer portion of the disc, its much less fault-tolerant. Disable the cache of your CD-R or hook up an old one to test it out if you don't believe me.
There's also just the issue of disc size. People like their consumer electronics to be small. Small consumer electronics means lighter weight, less baggage, easier to put in a carry-on for that three-hour New York to Orlando flight. It also means that there's less to lug around Disneyworld, especially when you've got to take a diaper bag for Junior. Lot's of people owned camcorders ten years ago, but they were big and didn't take them out. Now they're small, so people take them everywhere, which means that more people see them everywhere, more people buy them, etc. So I guess maybe there's a conspiracy to make small consumer electronics, but I'm not complaining.
At this point you might say "Ah-Ha! But miniDV also has the 1-hour limit. So did older Hi-8 and mini-SHVS tapes. What gives there, huh?" The answer is pretty simple. Those standards all spring from larger ones. miniDV springs from full-sized DV (with up to 180 minute capacity). Hi-8, though not identical, is derived from VHS. The origin of mini-SVHS and mini-VHS should be obvious. With the possible exception of Hi-8, the mini-formats exist so that they are interoperable with the larger standard. Sure, maybe it'd be possible to re-design miniDV so that it would have higher capacity. But that would make it incompatable with full-DV -- a compatability that not only drives down costs (one standard) but also makes it appeal to the professional and semi-professional market (you can't fault electronics companies for being good businesspeople). There's some simple math here. MiniDV is about half the size of full-DV (in terms of tape length). If max DV = 180 minutes, than max miniDV should equal 90 minutes (which is the case). Half the tape, half the length. Same goes for mini-VHS -- a standard that was invented to keep portability high and still allow tapes to be played in regular VCRs (wasn't that cool -- and talk about something that might encourage piracy!).
The miniaturization of the standards occurred because electronics companies know that consumers will put portability ahead of media length. Sometimes it's a pain -- weddings, bar mitzvahs, Junior's debut as Hamlet -- often last longer than an hour. But for most consumers, the portability and size are well worth it (check out bhphotovideo.com to see how big full-size DV/SVHS camcorders are).
Corporate conspiracy hogwash. The limits in each case derive from standards, and nobody was thinking of any sort of conspiracy when developing the original standard. To think that the media companies think that far ahead is giving them way, way too much credit. It's a little akin to saying that backup manufacturers are keeping their capacity low relative to hard-drive/server capacity so that people have to buy multiple backup systems. That's pretty crazy. Media are limited. Get used to it.
As for the size of the hard-drive in question, I think I can shed some light on that. As a consultant who works largely with design/graphics/art firms, I work with digital video systems a lot. Hard drive fault tolerance is a huge factor -- when you're streaming video, a slight failure translates into choppy video, dropped frames, or worse (like a loss of timecode that renders subsequent footage near-useless). A variety of professional companies make expensive portable FireWire drives that you can connect to a camcorder to capture footage directly to disk instead of to tape. These systems have huge (often 25+ meg) cache. Some of my clients have invested in these systems and been extremely disappointed. Anything more than a smooth walk causes dropped frames or corrupted files. Regular hard drives, even laptop drives, might be able to stand up to the stress for occasional disk access (such as with an iPod). But for continuous write, much higher standards are necessary. Keeping the cost down was probably a big impetus to only having a 1.5 gig drive -- again, most consumers really don't need more than an hour of video.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.