Posted by Taylor Cox on September 5, 2010 at 11:37pm
These camera's are $299, full widescreen HD, 2 hours of battery life. They come with a waterproof casing and are very resistant to shock. Combined with a 16Gb SD card, you can shoot about 4 hours of video. My brother works in LA and he just bought a few of these for a documentary he is going on oyster farming. He has some pretty impressive vids of dredging for the oyster bags under water. I think this would be a perfect addition to arduCopter.
The USB port is certainly fast enough, and in theory yes I guess it could be used, but it would have to be a braver man than me to undertake all the hardware surgery involved in connecting up the internal SD wiring to the USB port. Anyhow, the USB port is an optional power input and one of the reasons why one would want to run video out of the camera is when the recording session is so long that there isn’t sufficient onboard memory – in which case chances are pretty good one would also be using the USB port for extra power.
There are preferable options – according to my son, who is at uni with a friend who writes apps for the Apple iPhone and recently purchased an HD Hero for scuba diving. According to him the first and most obvious way is to use an SD extension cable -plugged into the SD card holder/socket and run the H.264 video stream to whatever one wants to connect it to e.g. a small rf modulator & linear amp (for live transmission down to a ground station). He has already used the expansion port to load up “live output” functionality – a function Go Pro have been promising users since November last year(!).
That live output is through the HDTV socket (which in standard config. does not output a compressed video stream).
According to him, he sees no reason why the Hero BUS rear expansion port could not be used to output a “live” H.264 video stream – the codec is quite fast so latency is low - it would be as “live” as it is goes to the SD card.
There is plenty access to the camera firmware/software and onboard functionality – its certainly not going to attract the same attention as the iPhone has, but apps are going to start appearing to facilitate all sorts of options.
The HD Hero is apparently available from a retailer in Hong Kong for $50 – if you place an order for a min quantity of 40 units. If there is sufficient interest that has to be a way to go - though I’d first want to send someone round to ensure the camera’s been offered are not Chinese counterfeits.
Well, the Hero video camera comes with H.264 encoding - all you got to do is modulate the signal and transmit it - which is exactly what you have to do with an analog signal as well.
Hang on sec, Jani - you asked me a tech question i.e. why use H.264?
By all means use analoge, but for what it worth you'll get a better picture over a greater distance for the same Tx power and with less bandwidth useage (and therfore less onboard power consumption), if you use your transmision to carry digitally encoded data ..... however, by all means use analoge - nthing wrong with it. I only raised the H.264 subject because it's used by the video camera in question - for no other reason.
A live H.264 encoded video stream requires siginifcantly less bandwidth when transmitted from a model plane down to a ground station than will the same video at the same resolution encoded with MPEG2.
In short: that means better video quality - and its not a theoretical improvement in picture quality, its a real world observable improvement - a consideration well worth keeping in mind at the consumer product level, where rf Tx & Rx gear for video is usualy bandwidth limited (hence limiting transmited pciture quality) to keep prices down, and to limit inteference with other transmissions.
For what if worth - eyeofmine.com (0n the webpage noted below) have played quite a bit with this HD Naked and have developed a number of add-on options to include live video output and wireless kits, as well as a few correctional filter kits
Canon make the image processor chips for this camera (Dual DIGIC 4 Image Processors) and 2 are used in the HD Naked which explains how GoPro have managed to offer all the video formatts they have using H.264 codec, but does anyone know who makes the actual image sensor?
I've looked high and low on the net but cannot find any info regards the image sensor manufacturer.
Does anyone know the manufacturer name of the image sensor used in this camera
Patrick, why would you like to have H.264? Sure it can be done but what cost. Idea on these small devices is that you have a rather cheap camera but still good picture quality with decent encoding. Most of the people anyways just uses videos that they record to upload it on Vimeo or YouTube.
It is a bit like in land of smiles (Thailand) everyone want's to have 3G phones and even buys them but there is not official 3G network in Thailand :)
Then again on a ground station I can understand it easily, you don't need to do so much work when recording FPV video stream directly to USB stick or other media.
And as what I understood, Hero and Hero HD are two different cameras.
Comments
The clue is in the bold underlined writing at the bottom of the posting, just above yours - got it????
The USB port is certainly fast enough, and in theory yes I guess it could be used, but it would have to be a braver man than me to undertake all the hardware surgery involved in connecting up the internal SD wiring to the USB port. Anyhow, the USB port is an optional power input and one of the reasons why one would want to run video out of the camera is when the recording session is so long that there isn’t sufficient onboard memory – in which case chances are pretty good one would also be using the USB port for extra power.
There are preferable options – according to my son, who is at uni with a friend who writes apps for the Apple iPhone and recently purchased an HD Hero for scuba diving. According to him the first and most obvious way is to use an SD extension cable -plugged into the SD card holder/socket and run the H.264 video stream to whatever one wants to connect it to e.g. a small rf modulator & linear amp (for live transmission down to a ground station). He has already used the expansion port to load up “live output” functionality – a function Go Pro have been promising users since November last year(!).
That live output is through the HDTV socket (which in standard config. does not output a compressed video stream).
According to him, he sees no reason why the Hero BUS rear expansion port could not be used to output a “live” H.264 video stream – the codec is quite fast so latency is low - it would be as “live” as it is goes to the SD card.
There is plenty access to the camera firmware/software and onboard functionality – its certainly not going to attract the same attention as the iPhone has, but apps are going to start appearing to facilitate all sorts of options.
The HD Hero is apparently available from a retailer in Hong Kong for $50 – if you place an order for a min quantity of 40 units. If there is sufficient interest that has to be a way to go - though I’d first want to send someone round to ensure the camera’s been offered are not Chinese counterfeits.
See:
http://wingshingmybisi.en.china.cn/selling-leads/detail,1108284526,...
Well, the Hero video camera comes with H.264 encoding - all you got to do is modulate the signal and transmit it - which is exactly what you have to do with an analog signal as well.
Hang on sec, Jani - you asked me a tech question i.e. why use H.264?
By all means use analoge, but for what it worth you'll get a better picture over a greater distance for the same Tx power and with less bandwidth useage (and therfore less onboard power consumption), if you use your transmision to carry digitally encoded data ..... however, by all means use analoge - nthing wrong with it. I only raised the H.264 subject because it's used by the video camera in question - for no other reason.
Why H.264?
A live H.264 encoded video stream requires siginifcantly less bandwidth when transmitted from a model plane down to a ground station than will the same video at the same resolution encoded with MPEG2.
In short: that means better video quality - and its not a theoretical improvement in picture quality, its a real world observable improvement - a consideration well worth keeping in mind at the consumer product level, where rf Tx & Rx gear for video is usualy bandwidth limited (hence limiting transmited pciture quality) to keep prices down, and to limit inteference with other transmissions.
http://www.eyeofmine.com/gopro/hd/live/index.html
Canon make the image processor chips for this camera (Dual DIGIC 4 Image Processors) and 2 are used in the HD Naked which explains how GoPro have managed to offer all the video formatts they have using H.264 codec, but does anyone know who makes the actual image sensor?
I've looked high and low on the net but cannot find any info regards the image sensor manufacturer.
Does anyone know the manufacturer name of the image sensor used in this camera
It is a bit like in land of smiles (Thailand) everyone want's to have 3G phones and even buys them but there is not official 3G network in Thailand :)
Then again on a ground station I can understand it easily, you don't need to do so much work when recording FPV video stream directly to USB stick or other media.
And as what I understood, Hero and Hero HD are two different cameras.
Latest firmware updates looks really great
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