Sony's MiniDisc Camcorder - It Almost Changed Everything
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- Опубліковано 21 сер 2024
- In 1999, Sony released a product that makes vaporwave look as 90s as a vinyl flowered couch: The DCM-M1, a camcorder that takes minidiscs.
Not only is it a fever dream of 1990s consumer electronics, it was also really, really well designed, and nearly led us to a future where video cameras do far more than just shoot video - but of course, neither of us would be here, creating or watching this, if they had succeeded. Watch to find out what they did right, and where they went wrong.
Before you comment: I realize that I asserted that the Minidisc was as common as the ipod in 2003. That's probably not accurate, but there are SO MANY of these things on the ground in the US that I cannot accept that they weren't standard-issue for the upper middle class in their day; so it was probably more like iPod ownership in 2001.
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The LCD is touchscreen
"Very nice!"
It includes a stylus
"Impressive!"
The stylus is extendable
"What?!"
You can use the all-metal body as a comfortable kickstand
"WHAT?!"
Battery compartment with Ethernet
"Is this fantasy?"
The camera hosts its own website, before the Internet was even a thing
"Ok this is off the charts"
Sony engineers really had a blast with this camera
"
And then Sony had to find a way to make sure it wasn't actually usable or useful... It's a SONY, indeed!
the internet was born in 1968 and the world wide web came along in 1989. and sony has been over-engineering consumer electronics for all that time.
I was also wondering how much crack they smoked before designing this thing.
I feel like if one were to look up feature creep in the dictionary it would just be a photo of this camcorder. As cool as it is, it shows how bad the Sony management was around this time, at least with regards to this product.
Uh the internet was a thing way before this but ok
oh no the magic of buying two of them is spreading.
I really wanna see a collab with CRD and Technology Connections
@@CaptainApathetic I think he's a big reason why a lot of us found CRD, but yeah a true collab would be great
two of them
I'll be really confused if "the magic of buying way too f***ing much dishwasher detergent" spreads to here too...
@@rpavlik1 Confused, but delighted.
Engineers: We can't include firewire because we'd have to convert formats on the fly. Also engineers: Let's convert formats on the fly to cram the video down an ethernet cable
what's really funny is firewire can and does send mpeg2
pretty much all cable boxes for over a decade had a firewire port and it would send mpeg2 ts packets straight off the digital cable out of the firewire
@@Mister_Brown Indeed, it could've just been treated like copying any old files anyway, it's not like MiniDV or Digital8 which was coming from tape in real time.
Firewire was often used to connect to storage devices, among a variety of other devices.
Ironically, it can also be used with network protocols
If it'd been able to transfer at a reasonable speed, MJPEG did have some benefits at the time though. It was pretty common to edit in MJPEG around then, the good Pinnacle capture cards at the time(DC10+,DC20,DC30) also captured to MJPEG(it had a hardware codec onboard). It was probably pretty fast for compression, and of course any unchanged frames didn't lose any quality or need to be re-encoded.
It honestly sounds like every engineer thought that another engineer was going to handle "how we get the files onto PC". One probably thought they'd include a drive for the computer to read the discs. Another assumed that it someone else was figuring out firewire. Then after they got the prototypes made up and tested them out and sent them back to go into production, suddenly someone asked "ok now how do we take these videos and put them on the computer", and everyone froze. OH SHIT - they thought in Japanese - We forgot to do that. The guy who spent 9 months adding video editing features to the camera just sits there with his head in his hands. "I asked my boss what I could work on because I was done with everything else. If only they had told me we needed to figure this out, I wouldn't have spent all this time making cool features that probably nobody will use now because there's no good way to copy the files off the camcorder". I can just imagine the team lead going "it's ok... it's ok... the battery compartment... we can change the battery compartment..."
This is truly amazing, a portable television studio!
Great Scott
That's heavy, doc 😂😂😂😂😂
Those boards don't work on water!
@@hanselmanryanjames wrong part/time 😜
@@themeantuber I know. Just one of my favorite movie quotes.
Until the shoe dropped on the file transfer and run time problems, I was envisioning a world where this product line kept going into the early days of modern online video, with people making entire edited videos and throwing them up on UA-cam. The video quality isn’t that much worse than what most people in those early days had.
The funny thing is that if someone managed to get a fully finished video done on their one MD-View disc, that would’ve fit the video length limit of early YT. But the inability to easily get the video off the thing just kills it. Sad!
I had completely forgotten that early UA-cam had a video length limit! Time flies.
Honestly, the quality on this was probably *better* than early youtube which, let's not forget, was 320x240.
@@SergioEduP Back when videos weren't streamed to the player, rather it was downloaded entirely and played.
@@random832 The Flip Video camera was all the rage back in early youtube and this MD camera blows that by a long shot, this was really ahead of it's time.
@@davidmcgill1000 yes and no - you could play it before it had finished buffering, which is what streaming means. However, it’s true that all streaming would buffer fully if you left it until 2010? 2011? or so, when Netflix first began their “zero buffer” adaptive quality thing.
As that technology necessitated dividing the streaming video up into many smaller self-contained video packets, such that the playback device could switch streams with no loss of progress. However, Netflix’s first system could still be buffered fully if you left it alone, I used this a number of times to pre-buffer episodes in tabs on my laptop to watch when I had no wifi.
Then UA-cam copied this, but implemented much better, and called it DASH. However, DASH also has a setting for maximum buffer time (I think DASH actually calls it “readahead” but whatever), which is why nowadays videos only load the next 30-60 seconds unless you use a browser extension to force them to buffer everything fully.
And basically all streaming nowadays uses DASH, largely to save the hosts money - because let’s face it, if you don’t have a data cap, you don’t really mind if you had a fully buffered 480p version which got thrown away for 720 or 1080. But the video hosts care if they “unnecessarily” transmit a video and then retransmit it.
The must-not-concede point was probably Sony's obsession with copy protection. Which makes me fear the transferred files would be artificially munged so only the original hardware unit (not model) could restore it to usable form, maybe even restricted to a single editing session.
Yeah I suspect that as well. They were probably encrypted, etc.
It sounds like a plausible theory, except I can't really imagine what copyrighted material you're likely to have access to. DVDs were encrypted, so you couldn't just toss 10 min of your favorite movie onto an MD -- even if you were sophisticated enough to find MPEG cutting tools to extract segments from the VOBs.
@@nickwallette6201 Copy-protection people are crazy and can easily decide to "copy-protect" things that nobody asked them to protect. This was around the same time that Microsoft audio tools put everything into copy protected WMA files.
@@johndododoe1411 Yeah, I remember running across protected WMA. I never used any of that myself, but IIUC, that's what happened when you ripped audio CDs in Windows Media Player. That, at least, I can understand -- it's basically the "you get one generation copy" rule as an olive branch from Microsoft to the recording industry vs. consumer convenience.
But DRM'ing your own video files captured from a camera? Like, not even a capture card or DVR... but a _camera._ That... I can't find justification for.
@@nickwallette6201 I told you they were crazy.
"[Those menus] are so packed it's tough to pick a place to start."
A7iii owner here to say it's nice to know Sony's menu philosophy reaches back across decades
Got an a7iii too and you need a degree to learn the menus of that camera.
Even Sony Ericsson mobile phones had complicated interfaces...
I have an HXR-NX5U camera and while the style of the visual index is different, the layout is very similar
Even their RX-1000 cameras have the same menu system. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were actually the same underlying, Sony-developed, embedded OS after all this time TBH.
Funny that the touchscreen interface is better than your A7iii and my a6500, right?
the ethernet port had me blown away and instantly disappointed as soon as you've mentioned its flaws in the file transfer
Yeah if this thing could have spewed out MPEG2 video at 10/100mbps it would have had strong geek appeal, even with the slightly odd (by modern standards) choice of doing it over ethernet.
It would have been an expensive toy of course but if it wasn't crippled ethernet would have been a good choice of connection to a PC in 1999, especially at 100mbps.
@@lemagreengreen Since it didn't have FireWire, their other choices were either USB 1.1 (transferring in approximately realtime at best), SCSI, or parallel.
@@pokepress Yep, I remember those days.
Sony was sure on a roll with their proprietary camcorder formats in the late '90s and early 2000s: Video8/Hi8 XR, Ruvi, Digital8, MD View, and MicroMV. (Yes, I know Hitachi also made a few Digital8 camcorders, but they gave up on it fairly quickly.) Sony also had a line of Handycams which recorded HD video onto standard mini-DVDs, with a similar capacity limit of about 10 to 15 minutes of video per disc at the highest quality setting. It was then Hitachi who took the lead at being weird enough to actually introduce HD camcorders which recorded onto mini-Blu-ray discs. I have one, but it doesn't work.
Recording to MDs really would have been the poor man's XDCAM and perhaps Sony took some R&D from the MD camcorder for the XDCAM format.
I have one of those Sony HD camcorders that record onto standard DVDs. At the highest quality setting the standard 1.4Gb mini-DVD disc holds 11 minutes. The interesting thing is it records in an even higher quality setting on the memory stick which holds 8Gb for 55 minutes. So they literally had a solid state camcorder married to a worthless DVD recorder.
an absolute roller coaster from start to finish. the elation and childish glee when you pulled out EXTENSIBLE STYLUS was only matched by the cosmic horror of DOWNSCALED FILES OVER EMBEDDED WEB SERVER.
“if you had a download manager…..”
Man, I haven’t heard that term in a loooooong time lol
GetRight :D
FlashGet :D
@@Nord72 Pretty sure FlashGet one I used. It had the red car logo I think
I use a download manager
@@HexOverride everyone does without knowing it. They are integrated into web browsers now.
I would very much like a CRD explanation of MO disks. One of the few YT channels where I don't feel like I'm losing information by not just reading about it instead, very thorough.
Every little feature is like another shocker, absolutely insane!
I wonder what the internal specs are since the Kodak dc260 was much cheaper but still had a full 66mhz PowerPC core. Must surely be all Sony proprietary stuff
you can find the service manual it's actually pretty impressive,
hitachi sh processor 32bit risc 80mhz for the system control and ethernet
208 total mb of ram across a bunch of systems 64 just for the sys control also 64mb of flash
an nec 33mhz microcontroller just to run the mpeg2 encoder chips
an ethernet adapter on LANC
theres definitely a ton of hardware packed in there, sadly nothing that looks like it would facilitate getting files off except for there is a uart on the big ethernet connector, and he's wrong the entire ethernet adapter is contained in the camera with just 4 pins going to the jack on the power adapter
@@Mister_Brown I'd be interested in pointing nmap at it in port scan mode to see whether there are any other ports open when it's attached to the Ethernet. It may just be that there are other protocols it understands that are not documented.
Not gonna lie at 10:17 it brought me back to 2006 UA-cam where everyone's home videos looked like that. in that Quality and of course the 4:3 format.
I miss those days.
This thing sounds like one of X billion devices that run java :D Seriously it's pretty impressive that a camera could host an Websever in 1999 while re-encoding video at the same time. Would be super interesting to dig up the firmware and taking a look at how they made this work.
Yeah, I'll bet you could reverse engineer the web interface/server and find the original files in there somewhere...
could probably take the camera apart and dump the rom.
I can pretty much picture the Twitter thread that Foone would do on this.
No particular reason it would be Java. In particular the lack of requiring a Java-applet compatible browser.
@@djsmeguk But it must've been only storing 1 or a few jpegs at a time, otherwise it'd rapidly run out of space. It seems like a crude form of video streaming, by updating the jpeg whenever the new file was ready. I don't think it was really re-encoding the video as such, just taking a jpeg snapshot of each frame.
I think IP security cameras, and webcams, often did this too.
As an MJPEG video I'd guess the file size was maybe 5x larger,if the video quality was fairly high. It'd need to be much higher than that to be as slow as it was.
I think the very slow transfer rates are probably more likely to just be due to the time it took to convert each frame to jpeg, and/or perhaps some problems with the webserver. It could've been done in full res in realtime, but probably at higher cost. Pinnacle capture cards were available then which captured high quality full res analog video, with an onboard jpeg codec.
Or they could've presumably just treated the camera like a firewire HDD, and made it a lot faster.
I obsessed over MD from the day it came out in 1992. I was in high school, and making mix tapes was the hotness. I saved forever to get the MZR-1, I loved my MD player and recorders and held on for over a decade when everyone else gave up on them. I still have my MD mixes! It was not just the format and tech that was special, it was the carefully created mixes that were made, the way the songs all go together to bring back a memory of the time or emotion. I have since converted my MDs over to FLAC so I can listen through in the same sequence of tracks that were on the disc. Long live the MiniDisc!
My instant reaction to the runtime and download speed revelations is that this is something that Strong Bad would use.
What a truly amazing product completely hamstrung by price and inability to output videos to a computer easily.
Sony gonna Sony.
It took you exactly 15 seconds to heart that comment. I’m impressed!
*NetMD flashbacks*
yep, they over-engineer most of their products for the 9% of the customer base that can perceive the benefits of such electrical elegance.
With a classic Sony proprietary media chaser.
If i remember correctly, there were Fisher-Price compact cassette camcorders, which actually had less run time. Of course, they were a toy, and not a good one...
Wouldn't those work with longer tapes from the local shop.
It was called the PXL-2000, and The 8-Bit Guy has a great review of them.
That toy video cam you referred to was the PLX-2000 and it used a standard audio cassette tape to record audio/video on. It was IMO somewhat ingenious in some ways how they manage to get watchable (if barely) on a standard audio cassette. I owned one of these back in the late 80’s as.a kid and I can attest that it’s picture and sound quality were pretty poor compared to a standard VHS recording (it used small crappy built-in microphone for audio). It’s video output was via RF if I recall and thus no composite output was available by default, though you can mod them to output composite. What interesting is how these toy video cams developed a cult following these days as the low-Res video that take is seen as a feature by a segment of the armature/student videoagraphy market who used is limitations as a artistic choice (much like how Lo-Fi musician use lo-fi recording as an artistic choice) and that’s why these can go a pretty good price on eBay these (Even in non-working order). Wish I still had mine as I would be interesting to play around with them and see what artistic choice one could make filming with such a low Rez video camera.
@@johndododoe1411 I suspect that putting thinner long-play tape in camera, which transport is working on 9x speed while recording could give some interesting effects...
Oh, 650MB! Here I was thinking “wait, at 8Mbps, how can a MD hold any more than ~120 seconds of footage?” and expecting that to come up as one of the problems. Well, now I’m glad that it’s actually more like 10 minutes 😅
Oh NO that transfer quality and speed. Just throw away all the quality on a lower power transcode huh?? SONYYYYY!!!!
In 8Mbps, the small b signifies bits. Capital B = bytes. 1 byte holds 8 bits.
So 8Mbps = 1MBps, or 60MB/minute.
@@DoubleMonoLR yes, I know. Since you seem to have missed something, I’ll walk you through the calculations I made. 8Mb = 1MB, 1 MD ≈ 120MB, ergo, 120 seconds of video at 8Mbps.
I'm not really sure when it happened, but some time around 3 months ago you became my new favourite über nerd.
Thank you for making such fascinating and entertaining content!
I had to take the time to tell you; your videos are incredibly well researched and, as a result, you have one of the best retro tech channel on UA-cam today. Keep up the great work!
There is probably some paid modern editing software that is way less powerful and easy to use that this thing.
It has no business being this good, but some dude had some time and a ton of skills, and he just did it.
There IS. I used it when I started out. This thing is REMARKABLY good, just a little slower than it could be.
Maybe they repurposed software from their professional division, with appropriate restrictions to keep the high end product viable.
@@johndododoe1411 Or it coud be the other way around - this might have been a test bed to iron out bugs in the embedded OS for the future professional products.
@@Hittares I love the idea that this thing is somehow Sony Vegas's great-great-grandfather.
I always appreciate your custom VHS tape boxes that blend into the background via their original era styling.
I was so confused when you mentioned Ethernet, then absolutely died laughing when it was revealed how the Ethernet actually connects.
i love this video, and the ideas of using this for presentations and inspections etc.
but I think the slowroasts of bad failed products from the past are always gold and fun, so never stop those
There are so many of these products that by the time he's done with a long list of them, there'll be newer ones to cover that have come out and faded away in the mean time.
I'm a bit peeved that a failed camcorder from 1999 appears to have better built-in video editing than modern Android and Windows 10.
Mini Disk never failed!
US failed, needing 8 tracks!
Why Fat people online? Why the US failed us?
The follow up to this camera had a built-in coffee maker. It was amazing, but unfortunately it only made tea. And it didn't let you drink it anyway.
And it only worked with Sony-brand tea and water.
And it had an HTCPCP (HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol) server, but unfortunately, it always returned status 418: I’m a teapot, for some reason.
It has to composite the titles, drawings etc., so it'd make sense of it to have to re-encode it to facilitate non-destructive editing.
Still bizarre why there was no option for raw files. Buhh
Yeah, the design philosophy seems to be you're be doing all the editing on the camcorder, with all the footage on one disc, and the only reason you'd ever transfer to PC was for a copy of the finished, composited, edited video.
Sony could've made and optional software transfer/editing tool for a PC. It likely could've transferred over all the non-destructive metadata to apply to the raw video, if one had applied any on the actual camcorder. Or maybe a separate portable video editing deck, with two drives.
that stylus, flip screen, and editing features are pretty damn clever. going to have to agree that it was probably targeted at consumers that didn't want to use their pc for editing, because that was exactly how the music minidisc system worked--it was for the most part a walled garden. if it were high capacity and cheap, it may have worked. what's tragic is that the interesting software behind it all is basically lost.
Crossover Ethernet cable is also one of those things that works better then than now, since all switches, hubs (lol do they exist anymore) and other ethernet chipsets are auto-sensing so you just plug a straight cable to anything and it works. As you said, crossover these days actually work worse than with a straight cable; I guess a lot of chipsets just don't even support crossed cables anymore since they do it internally.
This editing suite makes me think of the picture editing on my Siemens C65 phone back in 2004 or so, which was so slow and cumbersome, but also awesome at the same time.
wow not even 3 min and i gotta say - do a video on MO! First time hearing about it and it sounds fascinating as all get out
Two of them
Check the
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube
for some action shots of a MO
@@8BitNaptime ooh thank you I love this evil mac
ua-cam.com/video/-H1RUa2nEbg/v-deo.html
Imagine this camera in Back to the Future!!!
"But this is truly amazing - it's a portable television studio. I never imagined that"
😆
Ahead of it's time indeed...
Holy crap, this little camera is needlessly complicated. I kind of love it.
30:59 now that's an unexpected development. A real GIF machine!
I know part of why magneto-optical never took off: the market didn't settle on a format before CD-R and CD-RW took off.
There is a rather oddly-long gap between the 1.44 MB floppy in the 80's and writable disc media in the late 90's. There were several formats that tried to fill that niche, but the only one that came close to a real success is the Zip Drive.
Eh, MO was around long before CD-RW, and even CD-RW never really took off. What MO was really competing against was magnetic disks like Syquest, Jaz, and Orb (removable hard disks) and Zip and LS120 (floppy based). The drives tended to cost the same or less, and above all were much faster, especially the hard disk based ones. The trade off is that they were far less reliable. (Especially the hard disk based ones: basically hard disk platters exposed to the elements…)
MO stuck around for very high capacity applications and for ones with long archival requirements, like medical stuff.
@@pokepress Yep, absolutely. I used Zip extensively in the 90s, and totally agree with your conclusion that it’s the only such format that had any traction.
I honestly love all of your videos! Thank you for being so thorough with everything you bring to your show! You’re honestly right up there with Techmoan!
100% agree. i also have high regard for his excellent theory on the purpose of such a camera in the late 90s - truly a perceptive technology investigator.
I bet that if the MD Data came a little earlier it would be the media storage used for the Playstation.
Interesting idea, although I somewhat doubt it, since it was all about CDs being cheaper and higher capacity than cartridges and MD Data at least would have been very expensive by comparison. Maybe it would have been better for preventing piracy, but probably not really or even made it worse if it were to become a more household data format.
How cool would it be if the had PSP used Hi-MD instead of UMD. That would have given the MD ecosystem a little bit of a life boost (although considering you could just pop in a Memory Stick and load media with that MD probably wouldn't make a lot of sense)
@@gentuxable Sony made factory pressed MDs which were read with just the laser anyway. MD players don’t have a magnet either, just the recorders. So I could see the cost per unit being very similar, plastic caddy excepting.
Given Sony's penchant for self-developed media formats, I'm surprised their prototype gaming system from the late 70's wasn't designed to use Betamax tapes.
@@gentuxable yeah, they never made them for HiMD.
But it was more like, “hey, Sony did have their own MD pressing plants in the early 90s, so could probably have dusted them off in 95 for the PlayStation if they really wanted”; moreso than me trying to argue it was totally super feasible.
Especially since the first gen MD DATA was stuck at ~100MB too, they’d have had to develop this second generation before the PlayStation to really consider it a replacement for CD games.
But I can also kinda imagine Sony using them for save games, if they were able to get the economies of scale and the cost differential to the point where it was better than a memory card. But, obviously that didn’t happen and PS1 memory cards are still pretty cheap.
I'm not the only one to notice the massive jump in production quality in the last 3-5 videos right? Great work!
you are not, and i am worried i might be alone in wishing for the old workshop back with amazing video references running in the background.
Ok, I work in IT and Im never not going to call it the “Ethernet Hole” from now on.
Oh man.. years ago I stumbled across this picture somebody took in a hotel somewhere in Asia of an RJ port labeled "Internet Hole". hahaha
Guess what I labeled the patch panel port where our company's firewall plugged in. ;-)
@@nickwallette6201
Ah, classic Engrish.
Hey, so have you considered using something like nmap (or it’s packed in graphical interface zenmap) to port scan the device while it’s connected via that crossover cable and such? Wireshark would also be handy to snoop the active connection itself too (packet capture). All these tools are free to use, hit me up and maybe we can do some sneaky squirrel stuff with it.
I'm just imagining that training scene in The Matrix where Tank is thumbing through the minidisc stack and the labels say stuff like "Cute Duck", "Kayakers", "Grandma's Birthday", "My Dating Promo", etc.
The entire video up until mention of the data interface: _Squidward pulling out lawn chair.jpg_
Sony doing what they do best and shooting an innovative product in the foot: _Squidward folding up lawn chair.jpg_
"Suck all the files off"
Am I ever going to grow up?
*shakes magic 8 ball*
"No"
It has built-in webapp/webserver on an 1999 device to get the footage out. I'm not even mad it sucks, this is just incredible. Whole segment had me on the edge of my seat, love this stuff.
What are the odds, today I brought my MD player and a few discs to work to listen to. Keep up the awesome work CRD, happy you have been growing so fast!
One comment: 704x480 isn’t really the “low end” of DVD resolution, considering that it’s identical to 720x480 in terms of aspect ratio, and DVDs top out at 720x480. Those extra 8 pixels on each side are basically useless anyway
@@rommix0 no, that’s not how it works. 704x480 and 720x480 are more or less equivalent. Those 8 pixels on each side never contain *important* image content. Wanna convert from 704x480 to 720x480? Pad with black and *you‘re done*. Remember these formats hail from the CRT era, where those 16 pixels would be *under the bezel*, thanks to overscan
I love fixing up MiniDisc players. Especially as they're actually designed so well that you can often fix them without replacement parts.
"The words don't chain together in a way that fits with our perceived reality." - That's an excellent way of putting it. 😄
(Pity it's also an all-too-common sentiment these days, especially regarding politics.)
This is amazing. Thank you. I’m at 28:38 and chortling to myself very merrily.
All this talk about editing reminds me of the TWO, yeah TWO pieces of VHS hardware I had that no one seems to remember.
They both kinda worked the same way but different methods. One was a two deck VCR. You would go though a tape in slot A. Mark you starts and stops with a couple buttons. Do this all the way through the tape and when you finished it would sit there and edit your clips onto the second tape automatically. It was from a name brand, Panasonic maybe?
Second one was the weird one. It did the same but used an console. It had two IR emitters that you stuck on two VCRs and programmed it like a universal remote to control both of them. It also had calibration you had to do which was REALLY basic but really annoying to do. You had to like hit a button on the console while hitting FF on the VCR, FF like an hour worth of tape and hit the button again. It would basically "Learn" how fast or slow your decks were to start recording, FF a certain amount, Rewind a certain amount, et cetera. It was smart enough to compensate for the RW/FF speed being different nearer the end or beginning of the tape. To skip ahead...no...it was awful and never worked right. Anyway you would go through the tape again using the console and it would basically memorize your steps then again it would play them back while stopping and starting the second deck.
I DO know that I got it in the first half the 90s and I KNOW I got it from the Daymark catalog where electronics went to die. It was aimed at the prosumer market like schools and such. It was NOT from any recognizable brand of consumer or pro gear. It was literally called like, "VHS TAPE EDITOR WITH JOG WHEEL." Not the catalog description (wonder if there are any Daymark catalogs archived on the net) but on the top of it.
The ethernet interface and the file copying shenanigans... Yep, It's a Sony (tm) alright. What a baffling decision on a otherwise cool device.
IT'S ABSOLUTELY A SONY. who else could have bunged it up in such a specific way?!
They still do this dumb shit today. Like how all their lenses for their mirrorless cameras (which are mostly advertised for video) have focus by wire only. As a result almost everyone who uses them professionally doesn't bother with Sony lenses, and would rather use an adapter for better ones, or go third party.
There was one simple addition that could have saved this, it's called USB. If they just had the camera show up as a USB disk drive -- it would have been an absolute smash.
@@Stoney3K pfft USB? That'll never catch on (although by then it would be USB 1, painfully slow but miles better than the 10kb/s nonsense)
@@NunoSilva94 Not to mention that USB was, by then, marketed very heavily by Apple, with Sony putting all of their money on IEEE1394.
32:10 Uhh yeah I think I'd trust a crappy computer that might actually have a FPU in it to process a video rather than a low power 90's embedded system.
An embedded system is much more likely to have a hardware MJPEG encoder, which could work much more efficiently than a software encoder.
The time Sony made a MiniDisc camcorder specifically for wealthy Japanese golf nerds to record themselves and bother everyone with edits of it at the karaoke box. Of course they came out with this in the 90s when the Japanese economy tanked, so...
28:38 I don't think I've ever heard the term "battery simulacrum" before but I like it.
“AC adapter in a trench coat” would have been my CRD-style take on it lmao
can’t wait, must comment before watching whole video… i have wanted one of these MD camcorders since they came out and i saw one at circuit city. i thought my video shooting and editing life would be transcendent if only i had one of these - but the price was way too prohibitive. i have even looked for them on ebay every few months for the past ten years and never took the plunge. this video will satisfy my need to have one personally.
I am happy you have covered this. Thank you for making this video film content. I enjoyed watching it and learning about the Sony MiniDisc Camcorder audio/video recording device. I always liked Sony's MiniDisc format. When the MiniDisc was still a supported format I had a good collection of Albums that were released on MiniDisc format. I wish I never sold and gave them away. It would have been nice to still be able to play them all these years later.
You can tell I like this channel because I'm this early lmao. Immediately clicked when I got the notification.
Your channel is super underrated.
The best thing they could have done IMHO: Add a firewire port and make this thing an external drive! This way it wouldn't show up as a camera in iMovie, but it would show up in finder. Just drag the files over to your Mac. Done. No codec conversion in the camera. External FireWire drives (HD, ZIP, MO, DVD,...) did exist in the 90s and they did not require any special software , setup or dirvers (just like USB mass storage devices a few years later).
The next best thing (if FireWire was too futuristic) would have been a SCSI port to do the same thing.
It is depressing at how it could have made everything so much better, but because it failed, I now have to contend with crappy video editing software on my phone like Adobe rush or power director, instead of robust built in editors with all the features you need.
Thanks SONY...
I always forget there were common touchscreen devices before the Nintendo DS and the delayed reveal that the viewfinder was a touchscreen the whole time with a stylus hit me over the head like a cartoon hammer
Those demo shots for some reason reminded me of public access television, especially 9:05 with the plants. I could just see that so clearly as some cheesy crossfade.
Man.. Did Sony screw up on that product and MD in general. I would love to use Ethernet to transfer MPEG2 videos (with ftp or something). If I remember correctly DV was quite heavy for the computers and harddrives for the day as well.
I generally would love to used MD’s for more things as well instead of floppies and zip-drives , but Sony screwed up.
Great video as always. Thanks!
Phenomenal Retrospective! Loved your in depth product articulation from start to finish. Honestly, this video reminded me of the early days of TechTV and I say that with the highest of praise. As a filmmaker and lover of physical media (Laserdiscs & Minidiscs!) and Sony products specifically... this video checked all the boxes! Please keep up the great work! You've earned a new subscriber. 😊🤙🎥
This video got recommended (again) so I decided to rewatch and I had a thought. DVD-RAM solves every issue with this device. Sony being Sony and chaining it to MD-View ultimately crippled this product because by 1999 we had 2x DVD-RAM discs with the density of a full DVD. They had an opportunity to launch 8cm DVD-RAM a year early and have 30 minutes per side and at 30 minutes I see this being a whole lot more compelling. The small run time is less of a hinderance because you're meant to edit the video down and supporting DVD-RAM lets you dump it off a drive and since Sony was selling DVD drives already it wouldn't have been hard to list compatible drives in the manual.
22:32 _"...I don't think my video editor has that feature..."_
In Adobe Premiere, it is called _Poster Frame._ You can right-click on a sequence in the project bin. The Set Poster Frame option can be found in that contextual menu.
I'm sure other systems have that, too.
In Mac OS you can right-click any finder icon, select Get Info. Select the top file icon. With command-V you can paste any image you want to use as your file icon.
Oh wow hahaha, I didn't know about either of those! It's probably in Resolve as well then.
@@CathodeRayDude I did have Resolve on my other iMac. So, I won't be able to confirm. But hey... Google is our best friend, right?
That little icon trick on file icons is very useful. Those icons are stored on the disc itself.
I have a bunch of those Samsung T5 SSD drives. I edit of those things. They're fast enough to edit 4K.
Some of those SSD's I use as transport discs _(my internetspeed sucks)._
In Photoshop I have edited an existing external drive image, added my company logo. That way, when anyone mounts that SSD, it is clearly recognized on the desktop.
@@CathodeRayDude Found it... *Poster frame can be set!*
ua-cam.com/video/oSn1w5nJ_1s/v-deo.html
Great video! I actually owned one of these devices back in 2001, which I purchased from Circuit City in LA. I can't recall the exact price, but I believe it was closer to $1100 rather than $2300. However, my memory might be a bit hazy on that detail. My original intention was to return it after a trip to Europe, but due to the events of 9/11, I ended up being unable to return for several months. But that's a separate and rather lengthy story.
Nonetheless, I was quite fond of the camera itself. It had a certain level of sophistication that appealed to me. Admittedly, the recording duration left much to be desired. I'm a bit uncertain about how I managed to transfer the camera's footage, but I vaguely recall attempting a LAN connection at one point. However, I think I eventually resorted to recording the footage onto VHS tapes. Ultimately, I decided to sell it after approximately a year. Thanks.
MPEG-2 takes more processing power to encode than decode. That said, it was probably easier and cheaper to do transitions & effects on playback than during the recording process. On a side note, the softness you see is likely just the limitations of the CCD's resolution.
I have a Samsung MiniDV that plugged into a DVD recorder. It was 2007 and I got them both second hand. Great video. Thanks.
Great video! I was astonished by the featureset of this gem! Then I was speechless about the massive downsides D:
it seems very crippled by our 2021 expectations, but we should remember something crd referred to - most people had pentium 1s and 2s at the time this camera was being developed and the features this camera contained were revolutionary at that time. but when it finally was released, there were not that many people who wanted to create entire 15 minute movies all-in-one device.
it’s not uncommon for a company to conceive of a device when it would indeed be a smash success, but in the intervening 24-36 months it takes to bring a new concept through production the world has changed beyond consumer demand and now (1999) many people have seen the imac commercials about capturing digital video and editing home movies on a “powerful” computer.
i believe some of the super-advanced feature set was put in as a desperate attempt to increase the appeal after sony witnessed the computer world evolve ten time faster between 1996 and 1999 than it had between 1993 and 1996.
Don't know if anyone has said this but the 9 photo mode is bloody wonderful for certain sports. The most obvious one is Golf. You can look at someone swing. Your record what they do and then can track their motion and see how they can improve their swing. Would work for any racket or bat based game. I can imagine coaches using it for analysing kicking & passing, to see how stance is used in weight lifting, martial arts. It could also work in industrial applications trying to understand why a machine is occasionally screwing up something on automated line.
Its a really useful feature and if it's not been replicated on newer replay devices such as VLC it should.
BTW, I am really sad this never made it big. I wonder why their was never a Sony professional version of this. As size wise if it recorded HD with a SLog or even at higher frame rates by spinning the recording medium faster so that it used the whole disc in say 2 to 5 minutes it would be great for action/stunt cam use or quick interviews etc.
This really makes me wonder. If the webserver lets you download the stills directly from the disc, whether it would realistically be possible to hack it in some way to also pull the raw files off the disk for the video too. It makes me wonder what other potential the camera has for backdooring over a network protocol. Also, I wonder if the disc would fit in an MD Data drive and whether that would achieve anything, may have to be a Hi MD compatible drive though
I had a mate who had a minidisc based mavaca in 2001. I used to record my lectures on minidisc in 1998 & replay them on my big hifi sized professional minidisc player. All of which I still have!
Oh, an upcoming video about the TRV-950. Sweet! I bought one 2003 for about 2000$ plus 300$ wide angle conversion lens.
Excellent video! No surprise that there wasn’t a good way to extract video from the disks. Analog video capture wasn’t trivial back in the day so it would have been a big win to get the full rez video files on a computer. It these were more popular, I’m guessing we would have seen hacks to do it.
I had no idea the Movie "Sad Virtue Signal" was released on VHS. Rare find.
There is an alternate world where Sony put a dang Firewire port on this thing and allowed direct access to the files, the tech was popular enough to get the MDview discs the research money to increase their size and cheapen production costs to the point that tons of people own and use them, and then in 2021 we would look back at early UA-cam videos and know exactly what was made with the Sony camcorder because the titles/effects were so ubiquitous to early UA-cam that it became a style that kids born long after these cameras were around for ~aesthetic~ reasons.
This review is simply awesome! I can relate to your conclusions so well. I loved Sonys Minidisc Recorders, for the superior sound quality they were providing, as well as for the smart editing capabilities of these small devices. We used them for recording endless hours of the music we made. All of our Mindiscs are playing just fine up to this time, two decades later!
What a shame, that Sony didn't get this forward thinking Video editing software up and running on CF Media!
"Sony just being Sony" is the best explenation for Sony's weird descision making here and there! Great Video!
im surprised how snappy the editing features are especially if its applying effects in realtime during playback but who at sony thought that running a plex server at the same time was a good idea on a videocam no less.
right??!? how is all that ethernet circuitry smaller than mpeg conversion chips for a satisfactory export? could it be licensing cost?
YAY NOT EARLY VERY OFTEN but hey I like these videos so of course I clicked on the notification
Mid week CRD video? What is this blessing? You’re uploading a bit more regularly and your subscribers are continually going up. So happy for you! Keep up the hard work as it’s paying off. Appreciate your time and the insights into each and every topic/device you cover. WE CANT GET ENOUGH.
I lived in a rich area growing up and I still MAYBE saw one or two people (teenagers) who had a mini-disc player (and at this stage they were listening to pre-recorded media). I finally got an almost new one a few years ago with a 1gb recordable disc and I do have to say it sounds great (just a hair below whats available today). IMO they would have been a massive hit if they only took the discs out of their protective shell. I know they did it to protect them (as one scratch could render them useless due to size), but I think that alone wouldve help make it more mainstream.
I am very upset that those parappa the rapper stamps are permanently lost to time.
IT IS A CRIMINAL ACT
I think the issues with exporting video could be due to the fact the video effects were applied in real time during playback OVER the video. They weren't saved into the actual video stream.
If you got the raw video all the effects and annotations would be lost.
And given the editing features were a major selling point they couldn't budge on that.
Dayùùùm, you delicious big boy! This was a truly great video, and true to form it indeed went precisely as you predicted because I was mentally digging myself deeper and deeper into that tenaciously tempting hole of cognitive dissonance, a.k.a. "it is just impossible for this camera to have worked precisely as you described *WITHOUT* absolutely wiping the floor with the competition and monopolizing the market overnight, so this dude must be lying or something", and with every single epically overengineerd feature you kept piling on, and on, and on and the hole in my brain just grew deeper and deeper.
My disbelief as to why I had never ever heard of this magnificent beauty of a camcorder before watching this video was pretty much at its absolute limit when you dropped those last few absolute bombshells, and after that, everything just clicked. While you were busy wrapping up your masterpiece with that beautiful symphony of polite articulations aimed at Sony, with which you were essentially tearing Sony a new cable socket for the legendary achievement of _somehow_ managing to fuck this product up so badly. A product that I imagine, if freed of the ridiculous arteficial restrictions, would have literally been a guaranteed winning hand in every single other universe.
So, now my brain was equally busy with its last futile attempt at simply trying to cope with the cognitive fallout resulting from the instantaneous collapse of the entire 30 minutes worth of pure, unadulterated cognitive dissonance that had now begun unravelling inside my head (and was literally coming apart at the seams). Not much after that the harsh reality and the first actual realization of the humongous scope and the true scale of this fuckup hit me as if it were a brick to the face, while my brain was subconsciously recounting your line of reasoning as to everything that could have been, had this technology not been needlessly hamstrung by Sony. Literal picoseconds after that realization came into contact with one of my synapses, my mind, in its entirety, exploded right then and there. I mean, similarly imagine where we could have been today, imagine the incredible potential of the absolutely insane sci-fi like tech the human race could have possessed, if we had not wasted 500 years of history in the literal Dark Ages? While much grander in scale and much harder to imagine, that is a question of a similar caliber, and those questions intrigue me to my core! That being said, your videos here on UA-cam are pure [insert name to your psychoactive substance of choice] for me dude! I honestly don't know whatever this shit is that you're peddling here, but you better start selling it by the kilo, because something tells me that if you keep this up you'll be enjoying a million subscribers before long! 🥳🥳🥳👍😇
Back in 1995 I was on a radio station that used them for jingles and adverts. They were great for the time. Simple to use and easy to set up a advert playlist.
The 9-frame sequence could be useful for analyzing baseball hits, model-rocket launches, the amount of wheel spin you get when launching a car, and other super-short moments. Including golf swings...
Sony is a DRM machine. About 12 years ago my parents bought two Sony "Smart"-TVs of the same model (don't know the model number) and it has USB ports where you can record TV onto external HDDs (and probably USB sticks if the size and speed was appropriate). But the format used is not only encrypted, also if you just try to READ from it using Linux, the disk is "invalid" and you lost all recordings and have to "reinitialize" the disk. The same happens if you take one HDD to the other TV to play it there. It just says "invalid HDD" and wants you to "reinitialize" but at least it plays fine on the source device and isn't corrupted. What the hell man... And even funnier: It was difficult to bring the HDD back to use for PCs because the format was so odd it partitioned the HDD into many partition, probably like 10... For a normal person, those HDDs that were used on the TV would have been virtually ruined.
the whole pour at the end was the icing on the cake. what a neat camera though. loved the pacing in this one, been watching for almost a year and you just keep getting better
I haven't looked but have you done anything about the Canon MiniDv 500 recorder and how it started the whole zero budget digital independent movie maker who people like Stu Maschivitz & Robert Rodriguez were gods too! We all watched Once upon a time in Mexico and he told us how we could get away from the Clerks shoot on black & white to make a movie & hope for distribution whilst paying off multiple credit cards avenue. This is off course pre- youtube.
UA-cam feels like being around when Caxton invented the Western printing press (moveable type had been earlier invented in China or Korea), suddenly you can produce multiple books easily, and distribute them rather than having to copy a book one at a time.
I remember Amber who played Willows Girlfriend in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, using her earnings to pay off her mother's mortgage, putting her sister through college & then using the rest to make a movie with her mates from Buffy etc which she shot on a PAL Canon Mini-Dv C500. The C500 Was important because it allowed the use of interchangeable lenses but shot to a cheap but good enough tape format: Mini-Dv. The C500 also allowed you to change the "shutter speed" meaning you could recreate the film look, plus you could fairly easily retime PAL25P down to 24P. The really big jump was those correction refocusing mechanisms that adapted the image capture from Mini-Dv tape camera so that actual film lenses could be used with video cameras but gave you all the capabilities of film cameras in terms of depth of field. Gareth Edwards shot his film Monsters with one and then spent a year in post by himself adding in all the VFX. Which of course lead him to doing Godzilla & Star Wars Rebel One.
I wonder if part of the problem with transferring the raw files without re-encoding was the non-destructive editing stuff: most probably the disk is used just as a sort of "video project DB", possibly not even using a standard filesystem, storing the raw footage (probably trimmed, possibly on i-frame boundaries, if you discarded parts, to recover the so-precious disk space) and the metadata for all the effects, trims, overlays & co, so a re-encoding would have been necessary anyway if you edited the videos.
That being said, the camera DOES have the brains to encode and decode MPEG2 in realtime (possibly not both at once, though? but in that case it's just a 2x slowdown), so, even in the worst case, it should've been fast enough to download edited videos; going faster than realtime also wouldn't have mattered much given that 10BaseT wouldn't have allowed much faster transfer for 8Mbps videos.
Watching your videos, especially old camcorders, really has sparked an interest in collecting and using old electronics. I appreciate all that you do man, keep it up!
That is the most insane way of connecting a gadget from 1999ish to a computer I've ever seen. At first I thought it was going to be a clever way of getting data faster than USB was at the time (12.5mbps), but I really, really wasn't expecting a webserver that transcoded the videos into MJPEG(!!!) and let you download them at about 100kbps. I keep asking myself "why would you do that instead of just slapping a USB interface on it and exposing the MD drive as a USB Mass Storage device", and all I've got is Sony was/is really, really weird about anything involving digital video/audio because piracy (which seems to be the consensus in the comments here).
EDIT: oh snap this is highlighted I should probably copy-edit it a bit.
highlighted comment just means that it's the comment you clicked on from a notification, it means nothing (i had the same misconception as you the first time i clicked on a notification and saw that it was highlighted)
Could definitely see some artifacting in the low bitrate mode, especially on the leaves. There's some weird high-pitched chirping coming from the mic when you speak in variable and low bitrates, though.
Can't believe a Sony did better touchscreen interfaces on a camera in 1999 than they did clear until 2020. That screen seems huge for the time, too.
Too bad we also don't even get a clip/merge function in modern cameras.
Just chillin here watching this in my dorm one evening, and my buddy comes up and says that he used to have one. Pretty neat stuff.
This is so cool, thanks for the video.
I love that "B-roll: selecting focus and rotating focus ring" is visible on the page as you are.... ...selecting focus and rotating the focus ring.
Lol at "high-power nerds". Great stuff as always.
Edit: "Nice, that's the weed number" Ha!
I swear my dad had a handycam from not much later that used sony's memory sticks, but had the same editing interface. Definitely the same menus and pretty similar hardware design. Me and my siblings were effectively banned from using the editing after one of us stuck those stickers all over everything.