The first thing that ever used MPEG4 [Sharp VN-EZ1]
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- Shortly after I finished my previous video on the Hitachi MPEGcam, I discovered there was a second Hitachi MPEGcam. Longly after I finished it, I discovered there was an MPEG4cam as well. Now I have all of them, and we can see how they stack up.
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Thread about Flashpath:
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:32 MPEGcam: Followup
04:20 MPEGcam: EG10 reveal
05:45 MPEGcam: Quality & feature comparison
10:54 MPEGcam: What went wrong / teardown
16:06 Sharp VN-EZ1 intro
17:03 The MPEG Zone
22:58 Device overview
27:51 Visual tests
33:38 Recording time, macro, etc.
36:26 Audio, Gibbs, playback, etc.
38:46 Included software
40:38 Flashpath card reader
44:46 Conclusion
47:30 DoCoMo Eggy
49:16 Outro
global.sharp/inet-viewcam/ - Věda a technologie
![1000ft of ANALOG HD video over a single cable?! [AHD/CVI/TVI]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YYAVrLBKavM/mqdefault.jpg)
![1000ft of ANALOG HD video over a single cable?! [AHD/CVI/TVI]](/img/tr.png)
"still up after twenty years, if you can believe that"
ty
I'm a beliver!!!
You gotta call a doctor after 4 hours, I can't imagine what happens after 20 years!
Sharp: internet archive of their own.
In all seriousness, WHY is that site still up?!
I can't believe Sharp's website for this camera is still up after over 20 years.
I don't believe that
A floppy disk card reader seems like the sort of thing I would think about in the shower, and then dismiss as being silly and impractical. And these madlads actually did it. And it works well.
...and I want one.
Sony also had one of those that took Memory Stick, for some of the Mavicas of the time, and also could be used on a PC
8BitGuy did a video about the Sony Mavica series, and they had one just like it but it took a proprietary USB flash drive
I have seen all types of strange adapters in that era, Never once has that one ever crossed my radar. However I was only mildly into things that took external storage to operate so....
I've been wanting one for years
The microSD -> SD adapter -> CF adapter -> PCMCIA adapter was weirdly satisfying in a Rube Goldberg sort of way
Slightly disappointed there wasn't a miniSD in between the microSD and SD.
Ah, the daisy-chain of ever evolving gadgetry from the early 2000's.
Its the dongle dance, a true classic
Nesting dolls
Matroska file format :D
(TL;DR is at the bottom) About the atrocious audio on the Sharp camera, I did a bit of digging into why it sounds bad on modern codecs, and what I found is odd. It's audio is, on modern software, reported as a 8KHz 16 bit PCM, which seems correct, but if you open it in Audacity, it still thinks it's a 16 bit PCM, but you can see that the waveform, after it gets too loud, seems to overflow, just like an integer would. This seems to be how modern codecs handle the audio in those clips.
In other software, it's identified as a G.726 ADPCM audio stream, which is... not exactly a PCM audio stream. I cannot find much of any information on it, other than it's made for speech only, was used in DECT telephones and international telephone trunk lines, has a bandwidth of 0.3 to 4.3kHz, and supports bitrates of 16, 24, 32, and 40 kb/s. there's more info on codec specs online, but it's still a really bizarre audio codec for a "thing" that uses MPEG4.
TL;DR, the Sharp camera uses a telephone line codec for audio, which modern software doesn't know how to handle.
Is it DPCM?
Knowing this, it might be fun to download some of those test clips and write conversion software, so anyone with this exact camera can finally record with good audio in 5fps glory.
@@tbuk8350 I'd love to see it, however obscure it'd be! I just ITU's documentation on it. Easily hundreds of pages of how it works, all technical specs. Don't get me wrong, I love technical stuff, but I'm not gonna read a novel on it. Definitely not for a youtube comment.
@@renakunisaki I recommend you to look up G.726 ADPCM. My answer to your question is... well, yes? no? maybe. It really depends. G.726 has alot of quirks that make it super low bitrate, but easy to decode and pretty low digital artifacts, since it was made for telephone lines. G.726's 20-some year old cousin, G.711, is still used in telephone lines. If you have called anyone recently, you'll likely hear G.711. Newer "HD audio" on VoIP phones are G.722, though.
Well, knowing that now, I don't blame modern codecs for breaking around that thing, that it such an odd choice that clearly no one else followed for good reason
The MPEG Zone transition absolutely slayed me. Your high effort blink-and-you'll-miss-it shitposts bring me tremendous joy every time. Really spices things up, though your delivery just keeps getting better and better - I would never imagine a couple years ago sitting down for nearly an hour to listen about video codecs and specific obscure cameras, and yet I'm enthralled. Phenomenal work once again.
The video quality of the Sharp reminds me of the clips I took on my Sony Cybershot camera in 2003 while on a trip to Japan. Same frame rate and resolution. Honestly, when watching them back, it’s plenty good to remind me of what an Amazing trip that was. The camera did take decent stills so combined with the low res video clips, it was still a neat thing. It was novel and amazing at the time something so small and pocketable could do it. And you know what? Those clips are on my google photos with the rest of the stills available for instant access anywhere. That’s more than can be said of all the 8mm and DV I shot on older camera. (I frequently overwrote tapes to save on having to keep buying them.)
Completely valid. I feel like I should have expressed more clearly that I absolutely would have used the hell out of this, it's just that I've been stuck up my entire life, so I would have hated every second of it even as I used it voraciously
@@CathodeRayDude haha! I think you did a great job explaining it was fit for purpose and just a bit ahead of it’s time. Only a few years, later digital cameras could do the same and then, the rest is history. I certainly appreciate that this stuff existed but I don’t miss it. It was just neat, at the time.
I feel like that was the beginning of democratization of video. Now every single person has it at all times, just a mere 20ish year later. Sure the video camera was not uncommon, but it was still expensive and fiddly.
Reminds me of how compact cassette democratized audio recording. Everyone had it. Everyone was making mix tapes. It was cheap and ubiquitous. Kids to old people.
Those MPEG cameras are the same, but for digital video. The very beginning of the revelation.
Early 2000s sony was amazing. Late 2000s early 10s, not so much
Vvv
ZZZ sleep depression 😴
Additions/Corrections:
- JonasLue pointed out a very doofy mistake on my part: The reason cameras came with crappy Explorer knockoffs was almost certainly because of the thumbnail view. Apparently it didn't hit consumer Windows until XP. I could have sworn it was in 98SE but apparently not, and the deployed base of Windows 95 machines in 99 was likely still enormous.
Users would have been frustrated by having to open every video clip one at a time to find out what was in it. It's so tough to keep stuff like this in mind, even given that I was there for these features being added and remembered how much of a relief they were.
- LAP is probably for "eLAPsed", which is weird, but how else would you abbreviate that?
- This certainly wasn't Hitachi's first camcorder - they made pro gear for decades. I knew that, and I was only saying that I thought it was their first consumer model. There were some on the market with their name on them, yeah, but I thought they were rebrands which was really common at the time. Honestly I don't really know which is true, but this is one of those things where I didn't even think to research it, my brain just said "hitachi? heh, nah, that's not a camera you'd find at Circuit City."
- Should you have gotten a USB reader in 99? Well, probably not. I got curious about this during editing (too late to do anything about it) and looked a little harder, and I found articles where reviewers were rattling off all sorts of info about cards and readers and never once mentioning USB. And then I spoke to some friends who reminded me that Windows didn't really have a competent USB stack in 95 or 98, they basically supported HID and very little else, and not reliably. Again, a thing I was in fact there for, but I think I just missed this aspect of it. I'm positive I had USB devices on 98, but probably just keyboard, mouse, joystick - I would not have noticed if the rest of the stack was broken. _Apple_ had working USB at the time, but that's Apple.
- Fast forward/rewind may have been missing on the first MPEGcam because seeking compressed video is usually highly processor intensive... or, well, it can be. MPEG codecs are all interframe, meaning (in short) that unless you drop the needle on a periodic "I-frame" or "keyframe", you have to process a lot of frames in order to produce a picture, not just one. Now, you CAN just seek by hopping from I-frame to I-frame, but maybe the EG1 used a very low I-frame rate and it would have cleared four or five seconds in a hop, while the EG10 used a higher rate and shorter intervals, so it made more sense. Total speculation at the moment, but a thing to consider.
- Several Other Errors, I'm Sure. It is treacherous as hell trying to cover this wide a swath of information in one go.
Heh, I was just about to comment that Win95 couldn’t do it, now I don’t have to (but here’s some algorithmic engagement anyway).
Windows 98 got adopted pretty fast. At least among people I knew here in canada. Most people pentium 100 and up were wanting it almost right away.
Why did they give up on cameras using CD media? They have 1TB CDs and even 3.3TB now. Also why did they did the home market give up on cheap 1TB backups?
Windows 98 or at least SE could display a preview of an image or display a small windows media player view of a video in the sidebar if you selected it. It's something but the browseable thumbnail viewer would've been far more useful than that. I don't think it could display previews as icons. Maybe Plus! would've added it? But I don't remember it being a thing until XP or maybe Me.
@@Thrakus a cd has max 700mb…
Actually my guy, I clicked on this video because I'm an idiot and completely missed the thumbnail in the notification and wondered what the first thing was that used MPEG4... and you being an absolute legend answered it in the first 10 seconds. But I'm here for the whole ~51 minutes because I wanna see where this goes haha
Hey, CRD, I just wanted to point out that all MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoders must include a JPEG encoder as part the encoder. This is because I-frames are encoded in a format that is essentially JPEG, just without the headers that a JPEG file includes to tell the JPEG decoder what it's looking at. For those who don't know, in the world of MPEG, I-frames, aka intraframes are the bedrock of MPEG video compression. The way that MPEG works is that every so often you have an I-frame. Then, after that, you have a series of P-frames and B-frames, before another I-frame. P-frames, aka predicted-frames, just hold the difference between the last I- or P-frame, as fully decoded, and the current frame, and this difference image is much more compressed than an I-frame. There are also B-frames, aka biprediction-frames, every so often, which record the difference between the current frame and the two nearest I- or P-frames on either side of the current frame. These B-frames are extremely compressed, but no B- or P-frame can use a B-frame as a reference, so that their lower quality doesn't infect other frames.
In MPEG-1, the pattern of I-, P-, and B-frames is set before starting the encoding process so that you get a constant bitrate. In MPEG-2, the pattern is determined by the encoder during encoding, based on how much the image has changed from one frame to the next. If the image changes very little between the previous non-B-frame, the current frame, and the next non-B-frame, or if the bitrate is going over the limit set by the person doing the encoding, then a B-frame can be used. It the images changes a bit, but not too much, then a P-frame will be used. If the image changes a lot, then an I-frame will be used. Encoding quality goes up with the number of I-frames relative to the other types. B-frames are rarely used, because using them both reduces quality and increasing encoding time. Later encoders can do two-pass encoding where, in the first pass, no B-frames are used at all, but information about where B-frames could be used without reducing image quality is put in a separate file. Then, on the second pass that information is used to add in B-frames where they'd be useful.
Interesting, thanks man! So does that mean MPEG-2 has a variable GOP structure? I know video bitrate will vary with content type, that makes more sense now
@@petey8155 yes, the structure is variable for MPEG-2. Technically, MPEG-1 could also vary, but encoders rarely did it. There isn't a whole lot of difference between 1 and 2 as far as I can tell, but I'm no expert. In fact, all MPEG-2 decoders can decode MPEG-1 without a problem.
My knowledge comes from converting movies from DVD to (S)VCD back before DVD burners were a thing. Back then, the encoders for MPEG-1 were all CBR, and you set the GOP structure yourself. MPEG-2 encoders were all VBR, and varied the structure on their own. Now, reading in more detail about this, it seems that this was not really part of the standard, but was just how all the encoders worked. Both standards were VBR with variable structures, it's just that no one actually did that with MPEG-1. Wow, I'm glad I checked that out. It's even weirder than I thought.
To make things even crazier, parts of P-frames can be encoded as if they were I-frames, and parts of B-frames can be encoded as if they were I- or P-frames, which is a big part of why the bitrate can vary so much.
The sharp website being up after 20 years re occurring meme makes me laugh so hard each time it gets better
Sharp has always struck me as one of those really interesting companies that always looks forward but keeps a foot in the past, “just in case”. They know that users don’t upgrade when they’re told, and they have (in their eyes) near-infinite space for their website. What does one page matter, or one section? If someone is out there using this MPEG-4 camera today, or wants to know how things looked years ago so they can compare their new device, let them. Same usually goes for manuals. I really appreciate that approach. It’s not active “support” of the old product, but it makes you certain that when you buy a Sharp device of any kind, you won’t be disavowed the moment the next one comes out.
Though I will admit, there’s a little bit of “what were they thinking?” going on in my head when I see 2FPS video. Knowing that the human eye works “around” 24-30FPS, I am still lost on the purpose when I see a device doing less than 12FPS - give the human brain leeway and we can interpolate. 2FPS is nearly a slideshow.
I have to say props to the web admin who realized the webpage is so compact it probably only takes handful of megabytes why bother changing it or getting rid of it when storage is getting cheaper.
It's so annoying that given a few years these companies just dump everything off the website and make it impossible to find. Or act like their user manuals and service manuals are sold property that nobody should ever see the light of day.
This is 1999, having more than 15 fps video on the internet would have been pure insanity, even moreso for email. These resolutions and frame rates were still typical for camera phones in the mid-2000s as well
Hitachi should be awarded a medal for still having the site up for that product. That is epic.
Seeing you so nicely layout the history of divx/mpeg/xvid standards stuff with the clear difference between containers and codecs was really good stuff and things I've always wondered about. Makes me realize younger me had no chance of figuring it out at the time haha
I wish more companies would keep their old web pages up indefinitely
One thing I learned from this video: This camera's Sharp webpage is still online after 22 years.. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!!!?
Are you sure? He seemed rather uncertain on that point… :P
Ah yes XVID! Many fond memories of downloading Godzilla movie trailers from Toho Kingdom in that format as a kid. Either didn't know or forgot that it was original flavor MPEG-4. Of course at the time I was a dumb child who just heard them say "XVID is better" and took them at their word.
Also of course I just burned them to DVD, re-encoding them to MPEG-2 in the process, so that I could watch them on my TV. Ah, the simpler times...
As a kid, I kinda thought that Xvid was one of those torrent groups. At some point I found out it was a codec, but I was like twelve and didn't understand anything
some dvd players actually nativly supported ASP, but for some reason it manifested with either a logo for ASP or for either one of the codec makers. imagine owning a monstrosity like an DiVX dvd player lol.
i still have 1000+ cds in storage (most probably rotted now) from xvid/divx scene.. even more SVCD, many 3 disc movies.. 5 disc carousel ftw. great times!
I was COMPLETELY blown away by the internal mic quality at 9:44. Still, better than 80% of all smartphones ever released!
I know it's unlikely (Japanese company), but I'd love any of the original Hitachi engineers to show up in the comments.
(PS: I keep looking to my right every now and then to see who Dude is talking to. Give this guy a teleprompter!! 😁)
This is a great lesson in why you shouldn't buy the first production run of a new piece of tech.
Even true of the first iPod
Yet if no one buys it, they won't make a second run
Thats just true of most products in general after the rise of mass production.
You and Technology Connections, I could listen to for hours on end talking about anything.
It's always informative, fun and makes me feel like the world hasn't gone stark-raving bonkers quite entirely.
Thanks for the content dude! 🖖👍
and Techmoan
@@BushidoBrownSama deffo Techmoan.
And Electroboom for more insanity. 😁
@@BushidoBrownSama also DankPods and Look Mum No Computer.
YES MUST DO MASH UP
FYI, back in 2014 I reviewed what the manufacturer claimed to be the world's first "VHS-quality" 30fps MPEG4 camcorder, the Pretec DV-2400i from 2003: czcams.com/video/x9Htw2E926s/video.html
Wow, that is a real leap forward. I can't decide if I think it looks astonishing for only being a couple years newer, or astonishing that it took so long to make it only that far.
@@CathodeRayDude And a few months later the Panasonic D-Snap totally blew it away in terms of video quality, although it was crippled with a recording time of 10 minutes on a $350 SD card if you wanted the best quality.
I remember having seen similar but way crappier cameras like these in the german Pearl Catalogs a lot back then. Those cams often also served as USB webcam but the price of the memory card and the capacities just never appealed to me.
Joke’s on you, I clicked on the notification without even *looking* at the thumbnail!
hey, it's for the newcomers!
Two nerdy corrections:
1. H.261 is a separate standard from MPEG-1. They're very similar, but they are different - MPEG-1 can do basically any resolution up to 4095x4095 at up to 100mbps, while H.261 is limited to 176x144 and 352x288 at up to 4mbps. H.261 also predates MPEG-1 by a few years - 1988 vs 1991.
2. H.263 is indeed a different codec to MPEG-4 SP/ASP. H.263 was common, but only really on older mobile phones. It only supports a set of resolutions (128x96, 176x144, 352x288, 704x576, and 1408x1152), and I believe may be computationally a bit simpler but don't quote me on that.
Guess that magazine clip he showed from the time made the same conflation - it said MPEG-1 was limited to 320x240, which is clearly the NTSC “version” of 288p. By your info here that’s a close match to H.261, not MPEG-1. I was going to say it was neat they were thinking about UHD resolutions and high bit rates even back then, but it is called the _Moving Picture_ Experts Group, not the Online Video Experts Group. They were thinking about digital tape and optical discs, predominantly, so it makes sense. 100-200Mbps were easily achievable on digital video tape, and some of the early SD digital tape boxes used ~150 with little to no compression IIRC. So 100 is a sensible ceiling limit for their first digital video compression standard.
@@kaitlyn__LThat might potentially be something to do with maybe how MPEG-1 evolved over time or something - H.261 was rarely used (if at all) excluding video telephony. H.261's resolutions fit in perfectly with the bitrate limits of late 1980s dual ISDN lines. Also your view on how they might have used MPEG-1 for recording to tape is never one that I thought of, however it makes perfect sense. Also in terms of MPEG-1 on discs, it did indeed become a commercial product with 1991's VCD (Video CD). You got 352x288/352x240 MPEG-1 at 1150kbps, and MPEG-1 Layer-II audio (stereo at 224kbps). They were quite popular in Asia (and still even are to this day). And yes, I did go to the effort of transcoding GotG (and its extras) into the correct codecs and bitrates, and then put it on 2 of them (the amount of video is the same as a standard audio CD, so up to 80 minutes per disc). Quality absolutely reeks, amazingly enough.
@@LBSiUK see, I knew about VCDs and had presumed they used Layer I or Layer II audio, but didn’t ever really think about the codec - perhaps I just assumed it was much lower bit rate MPEG-2. So I was kind of referring to VCD in my first comment but I wasn’t fully confident to simply invoke it as a use case. Thanks for the confirmation!
As for tape, I was thinking of the uncompressed D1 from ’88 which was actually a little more than I said - ~170Mbps in fact. Though the still-uncompressed D2 from ’89 is a mind-boggling 480Mbps(!!) so, 100Mbps sounds pretty tame compared to that. I was wondering if Digibeta might’ve been a use case, since that ran at ~90, close to MPEG-1’s limits and came out in ’93, but that seems to use a proprietary Sony codec (albeit still discrete cosine transform based just like the MPEG codecs).
By the way, I just read a book called “How Music Got Free” by Stephen Witt, it’s mostly about the history of the MP3 but it goes a bit into the other Audio Layers as well, and also covers the music industry and the piracy Scene of the 90s and up until the mid-00s. You might find it interesting!
I knew a decent chunk about MP3 already, but until reading the book I didn’t know that AAC was a slightly updated internal prototype of MP3, mostly just lacking the terrible filter-bank MAGICAM had strongarmed MPEG into demanding be used. We could’ve had faster encodes and slightly better bitrate performance all along, if Fraunhofer had been allowed to use their own filter-bank. AAC might not have even been necessary to release!
Edit/addendum: Speaking of the MP3, it was also designed around the target of 128k for ISDN. The original idea was for streaming “CD quality audio” over those pipes - they were taken by surprise that it was widely-adopted for storage! So that’s a neat confluence there with what you said. I suppose ISDN was very influential all over the place, we do see 128/64/32k bitrates (and higher multiples) in lots of places after all.
@@kaitlyn__L Oh wow! I remember Sony D1 now - the tapes are ENOURMOUS! Each one even came with it's own sorta 'briefcase' lol. And big thanks for the book recommendation, I'll have to read it at some point. In terms of the whole MP3 fiasco, that's something I also knew partially about, however had no idea that they couldn't even use their own filter bank!
Also in terms of the other audio Layers, I've managed to encode all three - turns out that the best MP3 encoder (at least for 128kbps) that I've managed to find happens to actually be Fraunhofer's IIS Pro encoder rather than LAME. For Layer II I've only tried a couple of encoders, however so far TwoLAME appears to be the best. Layer-1 encoders are really rather rare, however I have managed to encode a few things with SoloH (off of ReallyRareWares). To put it simply, 128kbps SoloH MP1 sounds a lot like LAME MP3 at 64kbps.
@@LBSiUK heh yeah, Fraunhofer’s guys pretty much just said “but our filter-bank is better!” in objection, and MPEG said “sure, but we’re the standards body, and MAGICAM is a big partner of ours. Take it or leave it :)”. So that’s why MP3 encodes take so long to do, it’s mostly running through all those cycles in that terrible slow filter bank.
But then, because it performed worse on the encode (even though the earlier prototypes didn’t!) it was sidelined for Layer II initially by MPEG. The guy from Fraunhofer he interviewed for the book basically says he thinks it was a stitch-up to let Philips and MAGICAM “win” the competition. But he got the last laugh because the smaller file size of MP3 was worth the longer encode time for file sharing, and it was less resource-intensive to decode so portable players were easier to make.
I’m not surprised that Fraunhofer’s own implementation of the encoder is the strongest, that remains the case for other codecs AFAIK - Apple licenses Fraunhofer’s AAC encoder and it outperforms the free ones for any given bitrate.
I wonder if a DCC machine is a better hardware Layer I encoder than that software - Layer I was Philips’ own creation as I recall, so the ASICs or whatever they put in those boxes might do a decent job?
19:29 MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263 are arguably two separate codecs. For "compatibility" between the two, MPEG-4 Part 2 requires decoders to *also* be able to decode H.263; but as far as I'm aware and can tell (I have written H.263 decoders but not MPEG-4 Part 2 decoders) the way they handle this is to have an extension that upgrades the video bitstream from H.263 to MPEG-4. I'm pretty sure, though not 100%, that this is entirely separate from the extensions defined in later versions of H.263.
MPEG-4 Part 10 and H.264 are basically identical, because MPEG and ITU finally got their act together and figured out how to agree on a bitstream.
21:30 DivX wasn't open-sourced as XviD; DivX was originally supposed to be an open-source project before the company decided to pull the code down. So XviD is actually a fork of a really early version of DivX.
Also even earlier versions of DivX were actually just hacked versions of WMV1 - Microsoft locked the codec to only output video in ASF format and "DivX ;)" was a patch to remove the lock. Then they worked on their own clean-room version of the above.
God, video codecs are a bottomless pit of annoying little factoids.
Yeah the only place I saw say H.263 back in the day was Apple about iChat video call. Everywhere else was talking about MPEG4.
@@SuperSmashDolls DivX was a hacked version of the mircosoft mpeg4 codec. First calles projekt Mayo. The ms version could only encode up to 256 kbps and Mayo could do 6000 kbps. And you could use the avi containter.
@@SuperSmashDolls This reminds me of my hellish teens of trying to play video on the go, specially in school breaks. Also making that 40, then 80, then finally 320GB laptop hard drive to hold any videos.
Portable video players ("MP4 players" that *_NEVER_* played .mp4 files or anything on the MPEG4 spectrum), phones, anything. To hell and beyond with b-frames limits, FPS limits of the players (one of them played XviD 20 FPS with MPEG2 video on an .AVI container, and if XviD had those B-frame thingies (you'll know to tell it, I forgot!) you can be sure it had to be tweaked with perfection), bitrate limits and everything.
The world was a simpler place to live when I got my 1st Android phone (an Xperia X8 at the time), still VERY weak and picky but nowhere near that nightmare anymore, and I stopped ever caring on the next upgrade that just ate anything non-h265, 10 bit or 444 weirdness. Now even those are unimportant to just play it flawlessly.
@@SuperSmashDolls And at the time all these were used they were a bottomless pit of annoyance making sure you had all your codecs to play all the different video types. Then when they did not play correctly you had to figure out if it was a codec error / incompatibility or just an incompletely downloaded file.
I always feel so lucky to get to watch these videos before they go fully live. Thank you for the work you're doing!
special effects, crisp sound, framing, light, color ... you are getting pro production !!!
ho, I forgot ... the haircut and the shirt ... looking great man !
Is Sharp's website for this camera still up after twenty years?
It was only in the last few years that the Sanyo UK website vanished, taking with it the user manuals for their Beta video recorders such as the huge selling VTC5000 which in 1983 outsold every VHS model.
If you can believe it.
Sanyo was purchased by Panasonic and they deiscontinued anything Sanyo and started removing their old properties. They actually relaunched some Sanyo branded TVs to sell at Walmart to keep the cache of the brand name and to get more real estate on the shelf with two brands to compete with the low cost brands and house brands.
47:46
That styling is the one thing I could NOT stand about "millennium era" tech products. You've brought it up in the past, but EVERYTHING in consumer electronics had to be bubbly and egg shaped. It drove me nuts!! (being a huge fan of 80's and 90's volvos "styling", that design is nails on a chalkboard to me)
Consider the other side though: these shapes gave the devices personality and an optimism for an exciting and playful future of technology. Plus, they felt really great in your hands, usually! Or at least mine. I severely miss blobject electronics being a norm and I think it was better that way.
weird thats why i love 2000s products
It's one of the reasons why I love 2000's products so much
yeah but what volvo have you got?
I definitely have a love-hate relationship with it. it's new, interesting, and futuristic, but at the same time tacky, ugly, and makes it hard to use.
similar to 80s boxy styling! I love all my Minolta film cameras. but at times I've found them to be *too* boxy and clunky
1:45: "0.3 micron CMOS process"--that's right, kids, the chip in this thing was made with *300 nm* lithography.
Me, at 41:45: *NO!* They couldn't *possibly* have . . .
(Narrator: They had.)
I don't even like cameras or care about video codecs I'm just here for your incredible story telling
Gotta say I was REALLY hoping to find out the flash path thing was powered from a Dynamo on the spindle hub but we can't all be winners I guess
I can't believe Sharp still has all these files up on their website after 20 years, if you can believe that.
wait, how long has the site been up I missed that part
I am glad you mentioned Divx. That was usually the first thing I downloaded whenever I got a new PC in the early 00s. All those extensions, asf, wmv, mp4, mpg, mov, mpeg, etc. It was such a hassle since you had all those container formats.. not interchangle, with all those odd codecs.
The worst thing about multimedia container formats is that, because most of them can contain just about anything; you have zero indication that what it contains is actually playable on any given system. Filename extensions, in general, are a terrible way of communicating metadata; and should have been replaced by a standardized metadata container decades ago.
Woah, I can't believe that Sharp's website is still up after 20 years!
I would imagine that the reason you need conversion software for trimmed clips would have to do with I Frames and P or B Frames. The camera may only be able to split the clip on a frame, but may not be able to re-encode the clip with a new I frame and re-calculate the rest of the encoding process of creating new I frames and interpolated frames.
18:10 Fun fact! .mov isn't actually any different from .mp4. IIRC the MPEG basically took the Apple format and standardized it. You'll also see it with extensions .m4v, .m4a, .3gp, and some others.
m4a is just mp4 without a video stream
@@TorutheRedFox and Apple used the MOV container for regular AAC sold from iTunes as well as for QuickTime video. M4V and M4A were subtypes of MOV, just as WMV and WMA were subtypes of ASF
How anyone in their right mind would skip around a CRD video and miss the whole story is beyond me. Always love these awesome retrospectives!
I love the history. These digital video cameras are from when I was barely a young teen and loooooved computers, anything I could do with them was cool. The history of the compression codecs brought back my memories of searching the internet for videos to download and collect... (which were usually RC car races and videos from hobby sites listing them and waiting the hours for them to download. ) The framerates and qualities of these cameras bring back memories too! Someone jumping their rc car and it being caught on 1 or 2 frames, 😆 but it was still awesome for me.
@@volvo09 Same here. I had a couple miniDV camcorders at school that always fascinated me. Had an esrly Concord digital camera that was a whole 2 megapixels I believe.
Great video, as usual. FWIW, I agree with your analysis that the Hitachi MP-EG1 was pushed out the door before it was ready by corporate decision-makers who apparently felt it was better to be the first to market with a half-baked product that didn't work well than risk having someone else get there first, even if the competition came out with a fully-baked one.
All three of these cameras were decidedly ahead of their time, a fact that you at least hinted at in your video, if you didn't come right out and say it. (Sorry, don't have time to go back and review all 51 minutes!) Back when products like these came out, I used to marvel at the idea, while simultaneously wondering who would buy them when we had older tech that worked better and, occasionally, reading reviews that often left me wondering why companies like Sharp and Hitachi even bothered to build them. Remember that in the late 1990s, most people didn't have broadband Internet access yet, at least at home where a consumer gadget like this would've mattered most. And, except for multimedia enthusiasts, most of us Windows users didn't shell out the considerable extra $$$ for hardware that could do justice to a digital photo, much less digital video. (Mac users had a leg up on this, one reason why Macs were always so expensive.) Personally, I didn't have either of those things at home until the early 2000s, and I've been an IT pro since 1987.
I had kids in school starting in 1997, and the first digital cameras that their school began using were diskette-based Sony Mavicas. They didn't take great pictures, but they were good enough for quick, small pics that could be included in the weekly newsletters that were e-mailed out. None of my kids' schools used digital video until at least 10 years after that, when the technology was more mature and more parents had computer equipment that could show it.
So, I'm guessing gadgets like these were more about proof of concept and establishing a reputation for market leadership than they were about practical use.
I lost it when you started pulling out like 3 adapters from the camera. Love your videos, I always look forward to watching them!
@7:30 One of my favorite things about mpeg - however it might not be strictly true - is that the standard defines the player and not the format or the encoder. It says: "Here! This is how a player looks and works. Now make something that this can play!". That's different to how videotapes and such standards were designed.
The ITU H.26*n* standards (or at least, the early ones) are even weirder with this, because H.261 was actually a video calling standard. Over ordinary phone lines. The handset would have a modem and codec inside of it that would let it negotiate and upgrade from analog voice to really low-bitrate digital video. So the spec is written with a bunch of language that implies the video stream is bidirectional, because in the intended use case it totally would be. There's even extensions in H.263 for in-band acknowledgements (e.g. "here's my frame, also I didn't get yours so please resend it") and conference calling services with multiple video streams - all things that make absolutely no sense to exist within a generic video codec and today we'd consider the job of a container or TCP.
MPEG was trying to unify basically every video market into a single common digital standard. They tried to subsume ITU H.263 (poorly), and also picked up a lot of weird baggage about trying to split the difference between NTSC and PAL. This was a market in which existing videotape formats couldn't even agree with *themselves* on how to store certain formats (e.g. SECAM vs. ME-SECAM recording); so it was a huge sea change to just have One Codec to Rule Them All.
As far as I know, this is how most (but certainly not all) compression standards work. That’s why you can have different ZIP compression programs that produce different size output, different MP3 encoders that produce better or worse quality at the same bitrate, etc.
Congratulations!
The Flash Path is a new one on me.
I don't think even LGR or Techmoan have talked about them!
Yeah I thought about doing a standalone video but after I found out how little hard info there is I decided to just slip it in here
@@CathodeRayDude seeing someone put C cell batteries in a 3.5" floppy is wild.
I think it's safe to say the reason people started referring to codecs by their ITU designations (H.263, H.264, H.265) is because those are at least consistent and easy to place in order, whereas the various names used by MPEG are incredibly confusing, and tend to become less meaningful over time as MPEG add new stuff to the existing spec.
That's a good possibility but another angle that's been suggested to me by some friends is that this is actually Apple's fault, since they (ostensibly) had one of the earliest marketing pushes for h.264, where they *called* it h.264. Could be, could be.
@@CathodeRayDude Heh, reminds me of the trouble astronomers have naming new telescopes. "Thirty Meter Telescope?" What's next, "Extremely Large Telescope?" Bill Nye: Yes actually.
@@CathodeRayDude they talked about 263 in their documentation/website/promotional material for the iSight webcam too (and its accompanying iChat video calls) in ’03 or ’04 or something, which was the earliest marketing reference I remember finding in the Wayback Machine while I was heavily exploring it in 2010. So I think your friend is correct. Jobs or Ive or someone must’ve found those names more aesthetically appealing.
@@ahensley at least the Event Horizon Telescope has a decently descriptive name! But yes. Most are a mess!
love how the set from the livestream looks even for video essays!
You sir are an amazing story teller. Love the content you’re creating.
I remember growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, and seeing how far, and how quickly internet video was being pushed. I got into actual computers at home in 2003-2004 and broadband was huge. The sudden increase in video quality over the internet blew my mind. The bloat added to websites increased quicker than early broadband could keep pace with at times. I remember playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and its expansions online with Team Speak and being blown away how much better that made the experience, playing with your own teammates and friends. Now, our internet is expected to at least stream 1920x1080 video smoothly, even if compressed.
Imagine for every electronic flop, there's an alternate timeline where each of them found enough praise, use, and support to live up to its fullest potential. I wish to live in the timeline where all of them happen.
Did you know Sony once made a game console, called the PlayStation? Nowhere near as successful as the Pippin, but it was a neat little machine.
I was watching the stream when you unboxed the VN-EZ1, and I'm glad you ultimately found the right narrative to fit it into! Great stuff, as always.
You are just a delight to listen to! Brightened my morning seeing your video pop up
You know what really surprises me, Sharp’s website for this camera is still up 20 years later, can you believe that?
I think that fact was mentioned a few too many times. :(
Never have I felt so called out at the beginning of a video, absolutely love this content! haha
Your videos are always so excellent! The videos are like eating a really good dinner you walk away feeling satisfied and full.
I don't know if you will see this, but I’m super stoked that your channel is taking off. This information you have spent all this time and effort to put together in a thoughtful friendly format can't be consumed this pleasantly ANYWHERE else. Your production quality has improved massively. So much so that when I introduce my friends to your channel, I point it out. The style you have developed is excellent also. You haven’t confirmed to the way lots of other channels have and it makes your channel stand out. For example, your choice of colour for the back wall makes your video, and now, your brand recognizable. And I LOVE how you do things like take the time to cut out the plants and things like that. It's worth the extra effort you have put in.
The Hitachi cameras remind me of my days with the Casio QV-10a. Late 1996/early 1997 purchase. Digital cameras, both still and motion, came a LONG way in the very short 3 years after that.
Interesting that it uses an SH-3 CPU, I've seen that in a Windows CE PDA/laptop but never thought it would be suitable for use in a camcorder.
Well... It seems like it isn't really.
Man, I love your videos so much. Besides everything else that everyone else has rightly praised, I want to say I really appreciate the continued use of the "two of them" picture.
I've never been a huge camera nerd but for some reason I always feel super happy when I see you upload, and I watch every video without exception. Love your stuff!
I love your videos! Just the right amount of nerdy goodness. :)
As a DSP engineer, I can tell you precisely how that extreme crunch distortion in the sample videos happens. It's simply digital clipping at 8 kHz sample rate!
Analog clipping creates under and overtones (harmonics), and so does digital clipping, but in a digital system any frequency that tries to go above half the sample rate (nyquist frequency) gets folded back down, called "aliasing". It's actually the same phenomenon that can make wagon wheels in video appear to turn backwards, but in audio instead of video.
If you start with a clean 8 kHz audio recording, and clip it in analog, or upsample it to a high sample rate and then clip, you'll have harsh sounding distortion, similar to what you hear when playing back in the camcorder's speaker. But if you clip it _while sampled at 8 kHz_, you have the exact unintelligible mess you heard when playing back those files.
This is also why, when designing audio processors that intentionally incorporate clipping in a controlled fashion (day job!), in order to keep this aliasing distortion manageable, you have to first upsample the audio at least 4 times, so 176.4 or 192 kHz, then do your clipping, then filter out anything above original nyquist, and sample back down.
Now as for how the codec changed since back then, I can only guess. Perhaps the interpretation of a scale factor changed?
Oh! Thank you so much! Here I was thinking it was a bit depth quantisation noise issue, I hadn’t even considered it was harmonics being introduced from not oversampling!
Something I don’t get about this thing’s nominal use case is internet speeds - particularly when traveling - sucked in ~2000, most people were on dialup. My grandma downloading that 1mb clip would take her a solid 5min. Tech support could include a much smaller jpeg and a few lines of copy in an email. Plus, if you’re traveling and have to send video using a hotel phone, 5 mins connected to a local EarthLink access number to upload at hotel phone call rates isn’t cheap.
On the one hand the 20yr old website is right, there are tons of use cases for being able to send video (and doing it in 1999/2000 is cool as hell!), but it’s just not practical in my view until DSL became widespread. I personally as a mega-nerd would have used the hell out of it, but I think the normies would have been like “you’re sending me a what now?”
I'm lovin' the new title bars on the videos & thumbnails & such!
Keep those...Seriously.
They look really spiffy!
I never knew that I wanted a well researched and presented video about the history of video codecs and containers, but you’ve gone and done it.
Can you believe the website is still up after 20 years?!
Wow, I can't believe Sharps website is still up after twenty years!
Love your videos! Love the Seattle footage. Super cool period of history that I don't know much about. Thanks!
These videos are not just videos, they are very well done documentaries. Thanks for the effort!!!
16:47 So, did Sharp take a vacation in July of 1999? Seems odd that they would say it would be released in "June or August", as if July wasn't an option as well.
29:53 You zoomed in too fast, you have to give the world a second to cycle in the high LOD textures.
I am so freaking addicted to your videos. So much insightful commentary analog stuff I had no idea about :) (well.. mostly analog)
Amazing work as always! Thank you very much! Very interesting!
Unfortunately Windows doesn't support H.265 out of the box because of patents so I have had to deal with codecs when I want things to Just Work.
My guess for why ASB exists is that the camera is incapable of reencoding. MPEG-4 is an interframe codec so there's keyframes (full image) and interframes (delta from previous frame). Removing the end of a video is relatively easy but removing the beginning will require creating a new keyframe. ASB probably clips off the end and clips the beginning to the last keyframe before where you selected, then tell the computer how many frames to remove from the beginning.
Oh huh! Shows me, I realize now that you say it that I haven't tried using WMP since HEVC got popular
It's better to use something like MPV or MPC-HC/BE that use ffmpeg decoders internally rather than mess about with the Windows system decoders.
You have to pay like 99¢ to get the HEVC codec from the Microsoft store. There are free workarounds. But I learned this the hard way when I transferred photos and videos from my phone and figured out I couldn’t do anything with them.
H.263 isnt much harder to decode than mpeg 1 and 2, to encode, yes its harder, but not by that much, maybe like twice the amount.
To decode H.264 is absolutly brutal. The forst HD players that used H.264 used a top of the line cpu as well as a dedicated hardware to decode it. A problem with H.264 is that the decodec is so branchy a hardware solution want really viable in 2004. Granted alreddy in 2005 the hardware become a bit better and cpu become a bit cheaper. And by 2006 pretty much any GPU with the help of an avrage cpu could decode H.264.
But this was a problem for digital tv
A weird case where being late to the part helped us in Brazil, as we got ISDB-T from Japan but with h.264 instead of their h.263.
I can only imagine the hellish price BD players would have if hardware decoders weren't yet a thing when it launched, as the lasers themselves were already enough of a problem.
@@Kalvinjj Yea.. they was on the shelf for €2000 the first year... And really, considering the hardware, that was actually even cheap.
The thing with the digital TV over here, at least in Sweden was that it was forced into the market really early, and it was first coded with h.261, then h.263 then h.264, then manage to kick the h.264 revision in right before the standard was set, but some settop boxes ended out on the market wit out the performance to decode h.264. Some people was mad, had to buy 3 boxes over a period of like 6 years.
In what world is "twice the amount" the same as "a little, but not much"?
Hi I'm a new subscriber. You speak very eloquently and your presentation is excellent. You deliver a considerable amount of information in a short space of time -- quite unlike some other CZcamsrs who drag out their videos to the point of monotony. Looking forward to watching your other content. Good job.
Exceptional video, explaination and presentation. You have earned a subscriber
Are you sure the site is still up?
Yeah idk, I can't believe that.
My dad has a legitimate copy of DivX 7. He hasn't used it in years but it's still a cool thing to have.
And now I finally know what XviD was all about. That's confused me for years lol
I am unsure why youtube suggested this channel to me a couple of months ago but I love it I learn so much new stuff. Super fun
Another fantastic video. So much fun!!
On the encoding front, it's high frequencies they don't like, that is lots of edges. Plant leaves are obviously lots of edges. Snow and Rain are also super unkind things to ask a CODEC to compress images of.
Also rippling water like rivers or lakes. Lots of inter-frame motion.
A big issue with h.264 in its early days is that a lot of computers in the early 00s didn't have the cpu power to play it, especially in HD. I 2006 had to "obtain" the payware CoreAVC decoder (which was then the fastest h264 decoder) to play 720p h.264 files on the crappy Fujitsu laptop I had then. Fun fact, the first generation blu-ray players had to use quad core x86 CPUs to decode the video, with the video divided into 4 slices decoded by each core in parallel, which will be part of the blu-ray spec forever even though a 40 dollar android box can decode blu-ray video now.
h.264 was was pretty exciting tech at the time because it was the first time it was possible to have video on the web that was up to par with TV in terms of quality (at least at practical bitrates).
And the ITU(?) actually made reference coding/decoding software for MPEG-1 audio in the form of source code, which people actually compiled into usable software and eventually forked to make the LAME encoder.
This is a *fascinating* observation in re: the early bd players, I knew 264 was a beast but I had no idea it was that dire. And yeah, I noticed there was a ref impl in mpeg-1 very late in editing but decided not to try to shoehorn it in mostly because, based on my observations at least, everyone still seemed to be getting commercial MPEG codecs in the day. It was an era where the availability of source didn't mean something was "free" the way it does now, but in addition, the reference impl was probably not a V4W codec DLL.
Damn, I knew those first BD players were pricey and chonky, I had no idea that was why. I kind of just assumed they’d used a decoding ASIC blob like early CD and DVD players did. Interesting that splitting the video into four streams is part of the actual spec just for BD players, especially since the earliest discs just used higher bit-rate MPEG-2.
Speaking of just barely handling the next-generation codec, my 2012 quad core x86 (i7 2600) can just about handle a 2K/1080 HEVC stream, though going by the CPU usage graphs I think it would stutter if it didn’t have SMT enabled (the i5 version of the same silicon would probably not handle it). It’s pretty funny that my iPad can do it on hardly any Wh, in comparison.
@@CathodeRayDude From what I recall, in nerd/enthusiast circles the most popular mp3 encoders were either pirated copies of various official Fraunhofer software, or compiles of the ISO reference software (and LAME when the project first started releasing patches for the ISO code). Fraunhofer actually threatened to sue a number of people for distributing compiled binaries of the ISO code, they were very protective of the MP3 patents. There's a reason it used to be a bit tricky to find binaries of LAME, or why most Linux distros wouldn't support MP3 without adding third party repos.
I have to say that I stumbled across your channel recently. This is divine.
All this way into the video, and you blow me away with the freaking flash to floppy adapter.... I can't believe that thing existed during this time period, and I never saw it.... anywhere... ever. How!.? That's by far the neatest thing here. . . This deserves it's own video.
I'm surprised something like the MP-EG1 would have been forced to market. I always get good vibes from Hitachi. I suppose there's no magic wand to force your engineers to finish on time
In fairness, Gravis, I think you need to consider the video quality contemporarily. I can certainly remember receiving grainy digital photos from one's vacation in the 90s and early '00s as a novelty and certainly wouldn't concern myself over such trivial matters as quality. And receiving a 30 second clip from someone vacationing would've certainly been a treat on my 56k modem, after going to grab a cup of coffee for the attachment to download. I think our opinions of what constitutes image quality when it comes to video changed once HD and certainly 4K became a thing. If your only frame of reference for video quality at the time was standard definition cable or heaven forbid grainy antenna channels, this doesn't seem like much of a departure.
I made that point twice though, once during the initial test and again at the end.
Once again, a delightful hour on video codecs!
Can you believe that the website is still up to this day? Wow!
Could “lap” be short for “lapsed”, i.e.: how much is shot so far?
Interesting possibility! Hadn't considered that, esp. as regards the unintuitive-to-us way folks in Japan often abbreviate English
Lapsed and Remaining was my first thought, especially if it was programmed by a Japanese engineer who’d scored highly on English in school.
A shame that the flash floppy needs a driver because otherwise I kind of want to see if you can make, like, a windows 10 boot disk that fits into a floppy drive.
I'd love to see that, just to see it! Considering how long Windows 10 takes to boot from a hard drive, it would be like stick the thing in, turn the computer on, choose the flash floppy as the boot device, then come back next week and log in.
Nothing stopping you from writing a bootloader with FlashPath support. Besides good judgment that is. ;)
The flashpath itself needing batteries is both very funny to look at but also very very cool.
Somehow despite your content being exactly my shit YT never recommended it to me, I didn’t become aware of it until scrolling though Technology Connections’ Twitter recently and seeing him RT you a while ago. I’m addicted now, I love all the upfront context on every vid and the codec talk here!!
Your use of Two Of Them continues to delight me. 💕
I bet this video will still be up in 20 years, if you can believe that.
Gravis, thanks as always for the content!
Wow, the FlashPath is so cool... I've been dreaming/wondering why such an adapter never existed, and there it is. Now I want one!!!
You address my special interest perfectly, thanks such much.
Another superb offering 👍
Thumbnail showing the actual thing the video is about and not a deliberately dumb face. Video title describing exactly what the video is about, completely lacking any clickbaitery. You're a hero, CRD, one of the last few of a dying breed. Stay with us for as long as you can.
Thanks for recognizing in the editing booth that while the world sucked back then it was awesome!
Love this channel dude
Thinking back to the late 90s the novelty of any digital video was so great low resolution and poor frame rates were often forgiven. Does anyone remember tiny poor quality music videos on CD singles? ok we didn't watch them over and over again but the fact it was still there seemed amazing. I can imagine being amazed at any person emailing me a video clip.
I do, I do!
Nice review! Amazing time capsule of the late 90’s.
i actually learned something today! thank you!