[mdlug] Preliminary report - Samsung HMX-H105 HD camcorder

[Ingles, Raymond]

It's surprisingly tiny, like a smallish flashlight. Even the pictures
don't quite show how small it is. (I'm used to a Digital-8 camcorder
which is at least 5x as big.) The HDMI output is "HDMI-C", smaller than
the standard HDMI plug, so someday I'll need to pick up an adapter, but
those are $9 or so. I came with component cables to hook to a TV, and it
uses standard compact USB2 plugs to hook to a computer.

 It'll record 1080i or 720p or 480p. You can tell the video is
compressed, it's definitely not Blu-ray quality or anything. But while
it's not quite what I'd hoped for, it's good enough for our purposes,
and looks good on our TV. The video codec is straight AVC1. Here's what
Mplayer has to say about it:

VIDEO:  [avc1]  1280x720  24bpp  59.960 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/8.33% (ratio: 16000->192000)

 Right now, though, I only have two things that can play the video at
full speed: the camcorder itself, or my Playstation 3. My main Linux
machine - a 2.8GHz Athlon X2 system w/2GB RAM and a GEForce 8600 video
card - can't *quite* keep up, it drops frames here and there. (My 2.4GHz
P4 at work, with a Radeon 7000-class card, only does about 10fps.)

 Apparently there's an NVidia video acceleration API called VDPAU that
came out fairly recently, which should help considerably if I can set it
up. I'll report on that once I get the time to mess around more.

 It appears that at least a couple of my card readers can see the SDHC
card I got with it. However, I had some trouble last night... I wonder
if once you get past 2GB stored on the card, they have issues. I'll have
to experiment a bit.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                    (313) 227-2317

 "A true leader now would tell Americans the unpopular truth:
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   whose appetite for oil is making us weak and vulnerable."
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