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Samsung's Linux-based Diskless Camcorder
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has a story about the Samsung Miniket, a digital camcorder the size of a pack of cards that also works as a portable MP3 player, webcam, voice recorder, storage device, and more. The Miniket (annoying Flash and sound) will be available in February or March in the US, for $600-$700, with a rugged 'sports' model to follow. The device runs Linux, boots in under a second, and is the first of several products from Samsung that will run a new variation of Linux called 'ARM-no-MMU.' LinuxDevices also has a whitepaper about Samsung research that shows the new Linux variant to be faster than normal Linux."
MMU stands for memory management unit. It is a component used to protect parts of memory from being accidently overwritten, for example.
Wheres the HD? Dump the "diskless" name and put a 40G in that thing.
Gimme that booze you little pumpkin pie hair cutted freak!
My guess that it uses some sort of flash memory, which is technicially not a 'disk'.
My spoon is too big.
The Miniket boots from 128KB of NOR Flash, and includes 16MB of SDRAM. As noted above, various models offer different amounts of user file storage, which is based on a single internal NAND Flash chip. The 128KB NOR Flash is only used for bootloader functions; all other system software, including the kernel, is stored within the much larger NAND Flash.
I think diskless means no CD/DVD/floppy
Since it has no MMU. Without the overhead of actually having to manage the memory, it's got to be faster.
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camcorder the size of a pack of cards that also works as a portable MP3 player, webcam, voice recorder, storage device, and more
Now if only this thing was a phone, a GPS and a PDA with 802.11 and GPRS internet access. Then maybe I'd consider buying it.
But does it run^Wwork with Linux?
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
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I thought ARM-no-MMU was like handsfree, but without arms...
I bought a little camcorder from HSN about 8 months ago for $140 that records to SD. It did voice recording / MP3 playback / still / MP4 video recording. -- it's a little larger than a stack of 40 credit cards.
The 'white paper written by Samsung' mentioned in the submission is titled 'Context Switching and IPC Performance Comparison between uClinux and Linux on the ARM9 based Processor'. So it is indeed uClinux.
There's thousands of products which are "diskless devices" that don't require a server!! This is simply an embedded device - everything it needs is on flash memory.
If this is using something like Portal Player's 5002/5003 chips? Those "media chips" were based around a dual ARM core.
This is not necessarily true. The difference in speed you'll get with a properly arranged MMU will be negligable. I hate SoC manufacturers who fall for this line of thinking and miss out the MMU "because it's not needed". It just makes development and debugging 10 times harder for a mostly negligable speed and power consumption gain.
Any SoC designers out there: please stop producing high spec CPUs without MMUs! You aren't doing anyone a favour.
I notice on the site it says it captures clips in an MPEG-4 QVGA format for playback with 'Windows Media Player'.
So it is probably using a proprietary Windows media codec for with there is no 'official' support under Linux.
You will, of course be able to play back / manipulate the video using 3rd party tools such as Mplayer/Mencoder which provide this sort of interoperability.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Hi,
I don't know about you but I haven had luck with samsung. I own a samsung minidv camcorder and a cuircuit board blew up within 18 months of owning it. The LCD and viewfinder screens have no video, just backlight is on. It charges, and plays, but that's it. If samsung would take my old scd80 and
send me one of these new digital camcorders running linux I would forgive them and buy other samsung products... but for now i would not buy another samsung product because I am not convinced that they last.
Why don't they used Compact Flash or Secure Digital rather than the damn Sony proprietary junk?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Memory Stick! Bleh.
I wonder what made them make such a poor choice. The right choice would have been to go with Compact Flash or SD, if you want smaller.
Memory stick is still a Sony bound product (I know that now there are other manufacturers) and underperforms other cards, since there's no such fierce competition.
I see this as a big minus.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
...stands for 'Advanced RISC Machines', the spinoff company that grew out of Acorn Ltd's ARM (this time, 'Acorn RISC Machine') series of RISC cpus. These chips made their debut in Acorn's Archimedes computers, and were the first RISC chips to appear in home machines. They are used a lot today in situations where a high MIPS/watt ratio is needed, typically embedded devices.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Panasonic released a similar device with their d-snap AV-50S
.ASF file format preventing you from being able to easily share the movies.
.wav or .mp3
However, the video is not truly MPEG4 as they encapsulate the file in a proprietary
Secondly, the voice recorder files cannot be played back on your PC (only on the camcorder device which is limited to about 1 hour battery). Nor do they give you a tool to convert them from their proprietary format to a standard
http://www.easternstorm.net/dsnap for more info on these matters.
Informitive?!? Actually, the article's informitive:
Is this a limitation or am I just not understanding the statement?
"Playback Fast-Forware and Rewind up to a maximum of 128 times."
"Files created with our Minikit are designed for playback with the included software and our DVD Recorders."
Can their files be exported to a format that I can playback in a program of MY choice? What can't I use my DVD recorder? I don't need another one from them.
Hmm... like most things, looks good 'till you peel back the layers.
If they've got the kernel to go faster, where's the source code? Don't they have to publish their diffs (under GPL), since they're distributing the new OS version with every camera?
--
make install -not war
The Canon S1 IS has 10X optical zoom, image stabilization, 30fps 640x480 movies, 3.2 MP still shots, and uses CF cards - all for around $300. Check out this review.
slightly higher per megabyte than CompactFlash cards
Yes, if you consider 20-100% higher slightly. Memorystick is a stupid, proprietary (even if they have one external lessee for their tech), technology that typically lags CF in both capacity and price drops. For example the cheapest 1GB CF card on Newegg is $63, cheapest MS Pro 1GB? $133. And that's not some aberation that I picked just to prove a point, I simply went to look for how far behind MS still is.
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The only problem there is that I think they use an older video format, since they can only get a maximum of 9 or 12 minutes (depending on compression) on a 1GB CF card. That really limits its use as a replacement for a camcorder.
Unless I'm mistaken here, this will allow one process to take down the entire machine, just like Windows. I've always said that the problem with Linux is that it needs to be made just as fast and reliable as Windows.
(Before someone mentions it, yes, I know that Windows has memory management. But it also has poor process isolation, of which this design creates a more extreme version.)