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Hardware Technology

First HDD MPEG4 Video Camcorder 321

Posted by timothy from the just-happy-to-see-you-dear dept.
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)?"
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First HDD MPEG4 Video Camcorder

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  • Hack it... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:07AM (#5167625)
    I'm sure someone will figure a way to replace the internal drive with a larger one, as they did the first TiVo's.

    • Can't Hack it... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cioxx ( 456323 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @12:39PM (#5168184) Homepage
      I'm sure someone will figure a way to replace the internal drive with a larger one, as they did the first TiVo's.

      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 [samsungelectronics.com] 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.

      • Re:Can't Hack it... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by LordNimon ( 85072 )
        TiVo is no longer hacker-friendly. Their Series 2 boxes have implemented several anti-hacking provisions.

      • Re:Can't Hack it... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Arjuna Theban ( 143564 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @01:39PM (#5168466)
        If anything you'd get slapped with DMCA suit if you "upgrade" the drive.

        You would not be circumventing a copyright protection mechanism and hence DMCA wouldn't be involved, unless they have some sort of protection mechanism built-in to prevent HDD upgrades.
      • 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.

  • Corporate Conspiracy? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's called "batteries" they power the camera. And often on consumer camcorders, they run out of power in an hour.
    AC
    • Actually the reasone MIGHT be closer to the fact that a feature film is 90 - 120 min (not counting the 3 hour movies). I would bet that this limit is to make it harder for people tape movies in the thearter. I know that's why VHS-C tapes were originally kept that short, even though there was room for ALOT more tape in the shell. You don't think the Record/Movie companies started playing dirty with the internet do ya'? They been limiting tecnology for years.
      • I would bet that this limit is to make it harder for people tape movies in the theater.

        I think your right, but you have to admit that it is an even easier copy-protection scheme to get around than CSS. All that is required is to sit through the movie twice then splice the clips together. WHich shelling out an additional $9. Yes it might keep the film off the street (and IRC) for a few extra hours, but it hardly seems worth the lost additional revenue of customers who won't buy the camera due to the time limit.

  • What I'd like to see.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by M.C. Hampster ( 541262 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {retspmaHehT.C.M}> on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:09AM (#5167635) Journal

    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.

    • Why are you backing up your harddrive if you don't back up your tape? its the same magnetic material inside...

      • My point was that I like to keep all of the video I take. I think this product is very cool, but for my use I would have to spend the time downloading the video to my hard drive, then back it up to something or else I would quickly run out of hard drive space on my computer.

    • Re:What I'd like to see.. (Score:2, Informative)

      by ergo98 ( 9391 )
      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.

      • You think HDDs are going to be more volatile than tapes? Are you referring to durability, ie able to sustain impacts, or reliability, ie not going to go bad in 3 years? Because for the latter, I'd rather have a HDD than tape. I don't have any stats to back that up though...

    • DV Backup ? (Score:2, Informative)

      by BESTouff ( 531293 )
      Well, you should be interested in DVBackup [sourceforge.net], this project does what you need: backup data on your camcorder. You can stick gigs on a mini-DV !
      • Well, you should be interested in DVBackup [sourceforge.net], this project does what you need: backup data on your camcorder. You can stick gigs on a mini-DV !

        I think there was some misunderstanding in my original post. What I'm saying is that I like to keep all of the video I take. If I use this hard drive solution, I will have to transfer all video I take to my computer and then backup to some other media, or else I will quickly be running out of hard drive space on my computer. Now, if go and use this software you have pointed out, I would be downloading from a hard drive to my system and then backing it up to tape. My current setup is a little more efficient than that ;-)

    • no mpeg compression on tape (Score:5, Informative)

      by blonde rser ( 253047 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @12:04PM (#5167966) Homepage
      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.
      • mpeg's, like most compression schemes, have the key frames (whole image) fairly frequently. Take a random mpeg file, and cut it in half, and play the second half. You probably won't notice any more than a second of corruption. (Do "la -la" on the file, note the size, in bytes. Then do "tail -b byte_size_divided_by_two filename.mpg")

      • Re:no mpeg compression on tape (Score:5, Interesting)

        by M.C. Hampster ( 541262 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {retspmaHehT.C.M}> on Monday January 27, 2003 @12:16PM (#5168041) Journal
        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.

        Well, I've left tapes on the back of my car, only to come back to the scene to retrieve them and found them smashed up on the street. After getting the rolls put into new cases, the digital video was intact. I guess that gave me enough faith to stick with Digital8.

      • BetaCam SX and IMX are both MPEG based professional formats from Sony. They compress across frames. SX is an ENG format replacement for analogue BetaCam SP.

      • Re:no mpeg compression on tape (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sancho ( 17056 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @12:45PM (#5168216) Homepage
        It's a completely different paradigm. If you want to be able to stick in a tape with mpeg compressed video on it, it's going to have to be digital--you won't be storing frames in the way you normally think of using tape. This sort of technology exists (some of the big companies were trying to beat DVD with it) but it suffers from the same problems that normal video on tape does--stretching, etc.

        The reason mpeg compression works as you say is so that you can store essentially whole frames in less space than it would take to actually store all that information. Most of the time, two adjacent frames of a video will be fairly similar in many respects. Now the frame(s) themselves may not work well with gzip style compression, but suppose you take the second frame and subtract (using color values at each pixel) the first frame. Now you will have a lot of white space (000000h) since a great deal of the data is repeated in both frames. Now you just have to store the first frame (full) and the computed second frame (compressed), and it takes considerably less space than both full frames. To recreate the actual second frame, decompress and add to the first frame.

        Of course, there's a lot more to mpeg compression than that. You also quantize the images to remove some of the less useful information, say, turning all 000001h to 000000h, meaning it will be more compressible. This action, of course, is lossy--you can't get that information back.
    • What I'd like to see is someone reverse this technology a little bit - how about a Digital 8 Backup solution? Something that lets you use your camera as a backup drive?

      Those tapes are awfully cheap, and though it may be slow, I'd try it.

      • If you made the mistake of buying into a Sony proprietary format, you're not going to get anything that Sony doesn't build for you.

        I stayed away from digital camcorders until MiniDV got cheap. I just picked up a Canon ZR40 for $409.

        Yes, I have a lot of old Hi8 tapes. I'm just going to encode them to DVD and live with not being able to play the originals again. Better than buying into a proprietary format.
  • MTBF = this week.

    But yeah, never attribute to "the cold hard facts" what you can more easily attribute to a vast conspiracy theory. Absolutely.

    • 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.
  • Just wait for a mod-chip for one of these things that allows you to replace the hard drive with a bigger one. You can also do this with the xbox. :-)

  • 25 hours?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by enderwiggen ( 174235 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:10AM (#5167649)
    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?

    • Re:25 hours?? (Score:3, Funny)

      by rworne ( 538610 )
      Not a problem at all when using the device to record through small holes punched in walls of hotel rooms or mounting behind mirrors or light fixtures in restrooms.

      This would be great for the pervert-who-works-at-a-hotel market, who are always looking for more recording time and an easy way to process and dump the files to a file-sharing network. A power supply simply isn't a problem here.

  • If the recording time went over 1.5 hours, you could tape most movies off the screen. Of course, a lot of other things take more then an hour, and I think most people would like to have more recording time then that. Which is why it probably won't sell well in this configuration.
  • I've been looking for a PC based MPEG4 motion picture recording device for some time. Does anyone know where one might exist?
    • I don't know what you mean by "device", but if you hook a camera to a DC10 capture card, and use nvrec [sourceforge.net] you can do realtime encoding.

      Another project that might intrest you is Mpeg4ip [sourceforge.net]. This project includes tools to do realtime MPEG4 capture and conversion of other videos to MPEG4 format.

      And last but not least is transcode [uni-goettingen.de], 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.

    • mplayer [mplayerhq.hu]. In case you have any other questions regarding recording or viewing video using open source software, from or to any format, the answer to those questions is also mplayer [mplayerhq.hu].

  • I think that a lot of techie's that has ever played with these types of devices has always said "why bother with all of these flash cards, why not just drop a HDD in here?".

    I side with the poster though. I would like to have the option to buy a larger HDD (even if it's only a proprietary one), at least 4.3 gig.

  • Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?"

    Otherwise you would be able to take them into a theatre and record an entire movie then post it on Kaza. :)

  • Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?

    Well :
    pros:
    if the battery can't follow you don't need that much more...

    cons:
    If the harddisc is proprietary, I guess it is some attempt at preventing users from using it in movie theaters even though this is quite stupid as you may come with a friend and record half of the movie each...

    BTW, if it has firewire, there could be a way to plug an external harddisc (depending on the firmware and its functionalities)...

  • Overheating... (Score:3, Informative)

    by drenehtsral ( 29789 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:17AM (#5167708) Homepage
    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.

  • Warranty issues with 40GB drives (Score:5, Informative)

    by BCGlorfindel ( 256775 ) <klassenk AT brandonu DOT ca> on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:19AM (#5167719) Journal
    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.

  • Slow it's been done with a 20 Gig drive (Score:3, Informative)

    by Networkpro ( 602073 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:22AM (#5167733) Journal
    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!
  • ... 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.

    • Two things:

      1) I don't want the guy in the next apt. over seeing that I still can't set the time on it.

      2) I don't want the guy in the next apt. over seeing the view from inside my bedroom closet.

  • Archos: Jukebox Multimedia. First MPEG4 Camcorder (Score:3, Interesting)

    by YearOfTheDragon ( 527417 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:27AM (#5167759) Homepage
    Jukebox Multimedia 20 Handheld Entertainment Center [archos.com]USB 1.1 20GB Hard Disk+MP3+MPEG 4
    1.3 Megapixel Camera, MP4 Video Camcorder [archos.com]

    Specs [archos.com]

  • Yes, there's a reason. (Score:5, Funny)

    by dracvl ( 541254 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:29AM (#5167774) Homepage
    25 hours of boring holiday footage.

  • Hey, Apple! Are you listening? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chocolate Teapot ( 639869 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:31AM (#5167793) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • The first (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cratylus ( 156571 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:36AM (#5167814)
    This is the first? hmm... it reminds me a lot of the Hitachi MP-EG1 [google.com] 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!)
  • Until a couple of years ago Samsung was in the HDD business and had a San Jose based R&D group. I don't know how much their business devisions talked, but it would be interesting to see of they are back in the HDD game.

  • I don't think a PC HD would work (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Uttles ( 324447 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (selttu)> on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:39AM (#5167830) Homepage Journal
    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
  • Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?

    No conspiracy there. It's the battery life. I have yet to see a camcorder battery small enough to carry and that can last more than 3 hours.

  • Negativity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:44AM (#5167849) Homepage
    I'm amazed at seeing so heavily negative a reaction to this gadget. Come on, isn't anyone pleased to see this?

    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

    • Re:Negativity (Score:3, Interesting)

      by verloren ( 523497 )
      A few objections:

      1. It transfers footage at a faster rate in part because it captures less data. Whatever use I'm going to make of my images (moving or still) I like to start off with as much information as possible and discard as appropriate. That's why DV wins over MPEG4 for capture.

      2. I spent a long time trying to work out an economical way of storing my DV stuff in high quality formats. I could get a DVD burner, but that's kind off expensive. CD work work, but really fiddly to store a lot of data, and CDs can be prone to decay. Maybe firewire hard drives. but that's not cheap either. Then stupid me realised I could just dump the stuff back on to the tape it came from, suitably edited! $6 for an hour of high quality video, which beats anything the Samsung can offer.

      3. If I fill up my tape in mid event I can swap it for a new one within a minute. Harder to do with a HD.

      So, interesting tech, but not yet useful I think.

      Cheers, Paul

  • Batteries too small? No (Score:3, Insightful)

    by acidrain69 ( 632468 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:45AM (#5167859) Journal
    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.

  • Target market? I bet I know! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:54AM (#5167909)
    so you can record video just over an hour!

    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.

    • Don't you see: this should be called the pr0n-camera.

      No, that camera was over at the Mandalay Bay at JVC's private show. It's a camera that uses DV tape and MPEG2 to record an hour of 720P HD. I took images and specs of this camera over to the Adult Video News convention over at the Sands, and the porn guys wanted to buy it right then.

      Give me HD porn. Maybe it will have the effect of shaking up the business and getting rid of the skanky girls infesting US porn. I understand implant scars show up beautifully in HD.

  • Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @11:58AM (#5167935) Homepage
    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.

    -
    • 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?

    • 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

      .
  • I think it has to record in standard DV format for it to be of any use to me.

    MPEG files (unless they're I-frame only) are not easily editable, plus the fact that none of the best software in the editing world (Avid, Final Cut, etc) will work with raw MPEG files without decoding/recoding them to something more useful.

    As others have said, if they made a version of this that had a interchangeable 2.5" HD port so you could plug in whatever capacity you wanted to use, and recorded standard DV video that you could transfer out with a firewire cable, (or, in addition have direct access to the filesystem on the HD in the camera), I'd snap one up in a second.

    N.

  • 4200 RPM (Score:2, Informative)

    by Kohath ( 38547 )
    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.

    • Re:4200 RPM (Score:3, Insightful)

      by roystgnr ( 4015 )
      The 2.5" drives in the laptops we get are all 4200 RPMs. I don't think that's fast enough to do video.

      It is if the video is already MPEG-4 compressed. 1.5 GB/hour is less than 500 kB/sec. I don't think there's a hard drive sold today that can't handle that.
    • I've been doing video editing (DV) on my powerbook's internal 60GB drive this weekend, and it's been just fine for me.

  • An anonymous reader submits "This is a few weeks old but we have to talk about this.

    Is the anonymous reader Joan Rivers?

    Seriously, is this product's OS open source? Is the specification?

    No, I'm not being a zealot for the sake of zealotry. I've got an Archos MP3 player. Nice hardware, but the software is merely adequate.

    An open source replacement, Rockbox, is far superior (faster, more intuitive user interface, more customizable, adding fonts, controls, configurable displays). In fact, the replacement is so good that Archos plans to use it for one of their newer models. Honestly, having run the replacement software I can't help but think of how much more attractive it makes the Archos jukebox.

    But Archos hasn't released their specs or their code, so the Rockbox developers have to laboriously reverse engineer such trivia as appropriate battery levels for different models.

    My selfish upshot: I can't (yet) run Rockbox on my Archos, as the Rockbox guys haven't yet reversed engineered my model. I could run it, if Archos would just release some specs. (E.g., low battery level is x volts, high is y volts.)

    From now on, I'm not interested in buying closed specification hardware. It just closes off too many good alternatives.

  • Not the First Hard Drive Camcorder (Score:3, Informative)

    by andyf ( 15400 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @12:19PM (#5168051) Homepage

    The Hitachi MpegCam [mpegcam.net] 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.

  • Is there a corporate conspiracy to limit recording time of camcorder to about an hour (like DVD-R camcorders)?"
    Gimmie a break. Some of you see corporate consipiracy under every rock.

    Did you ever consider the possibility that they put a small HDD in so they could lower the price point? And that once there's a proven demand for the product, they can use economies of scale to provide better features at a better price (cf, just about every technological innovation ever).

    • Did you ever consider the possibility that they put a small HDD in so they could lower the price point?

      bull. let's say i'm a consumer. i see video camera a) that can record for 60 minutes for $500, and another one for $200 more (hard drives are now at a gig/dollars) so let's just say, $700 for fun ($200 for a 100 gig hard drive is WAY exagerated) ... what would you buy? one hour/1.5 gigs or a 67 hour one?

      i'd save up my money for and extra week or two and get the better model... he DOES have a point, no video camera that i know for common consumers don't last long at all... granted, battery problems, but that's just another conspiracy eh?
  • ...but I'll plug it from first hand experience. I have an Archos Jukebox Mutlimedia 20. For $335 I go the JBMM 20, a Compact Flash card reader, a Smart Media card reader, the digital camera/digital video camera attachment, video output cables, etc. Then I picked up a 60GB 9.5mm 2.5" Hitachi HDD (same as the one Archos uses in the JBMM 20 just three times the size) for $198 on Buy.com and swapped hard drives. I have it partitioned as I also make very heavy used of my JBMM as a mobile hard drive that I take from customer site to customer site and don't want to mingle work files with my MP3s, DVD rips, etc. I keep an updated copy of Windows and Mac versions of all popular OSS (Open Office, The GIMP, blah blah blah) and install them for customers to introduce them to OSS and the great alternatives that exist out there. Anyway, I use my JBMM as my primary camcorder and it's small enough that I always have it with me. I'm just waiting for that magic moment to catch the next Rodney King or America's Funniest so I can either start a riot or retire! Anyway, I love my Archos and would never be without one again.

  • Why Small Drive (Score:2, Insightful)

    by hhawk ( 26580 )
    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."
  • IIRC, DVD-R's only store a maximum of 90 minutes (early ones were 60).

    Commercial DVD's get around this by making multi-layer discs. Consumer DVD-R burners currently burn single layer discs only.
  • 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.

  • Close, but no cigar (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MDMurphy ( 208495 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @01:29PM (#5168425)
    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.

  • Compare to iPod (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dremel ( 304553 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @01:58PM (#5168570) Homepage

    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?"

  • Intriguing. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Emmettfish ( 573105 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:08PM (#5168638) Homepage
    I wonder which MPEG-4 they mean here. The MPEG-4 standard for desktop video? Or the one for broadcasting? Maybe they mean the MPEG-4 standard for mobile devices like cellphones and pocket PC's.

    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 [mailto]
    CEO, Xiph.Org Foundation [xiph.org]

  • MPEG4 playback, not recording (Score:4, Informative)

    by peter_gzowski ( 465076 ) on Monday January 27, 2003 @02:24PM (#5168719) Homepage
    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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