Conversation

foone

@Foone

Apr 21, 2022

Replying to

@Foone

but yeah, the FD83 and FD97 are the only sony FD Mavicas not yet in my collection. BUT SOMEDAY

foone

@Foone

Apr 21, 2022

That's the FD7, FD71, FD73, FD75, FD81, FD85, FD87, FD88, FD90, FD91, FD92, FD95, FD5 (x2), FD51, FD100, and FD200 (x2) mavicas. I may have a problem.

foone

@Foone

Apr 21, 2022

I did a search to see if anyone has hacked the battery DRM, and got some non-helpful pages and then some "foone" punk complaining about this on Twitter

134

foone

@Foone

Apr 21, 2022

Anyway I have enough cameras with Battery DRM and enough InfoLithiums that presumably I can sacrifice at least one of them at the altar of reverse engineering

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

I got the battery charged. It works fine! (although I accidentally had it in movie mode at first and they didn't work very well) This image is 1280x960 and 212 kilobytes. So in this mode, you can fit about six images on each disk.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

I put it in movie mode and it records one 15 seconds MPEG file at 320x240, 25 fps, 1.30 megabytes. Amusingly when I re-encode it to a twitter-compatible MP4? it gets BIGGER. (1.65mb)

the last 5 seconds of that video are me trying to stop it. apparently when you put it in movie mode (at least on a floppy?) it records for 15 seconds, period. You can't stop it early.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

fun fact: this is the "high quality" movie mode. the low quality mode has a painfully low 160x112 pixels

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

and yep. FAST. a full disk in 16.7s.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

my windows PC has decided to stop recognizing USB floppy drives today but I plugged it into a linux machine and DD'd the whole disk off and it took 48.8s, on a TEAC FD-05PUB (the ISO standard USB floppy drive)

foone

@Foone

and if you're at all interested in Floppy Disk Speeds, check out this video from

@crdudeyoutube

youtube.com

Reading floppy disks? GOTTA GO FAST!

This is a video I've wanted to make for several years, ever since I discovered my Mavica had a high speed drive in it. As cool as all of these are, it's stil...

4:11 PM · Apr 22, 2022

Replying to

interestingly, when you plug in the mavica by USB? It doesn't show up as a floppy. It shows up as a generic removable drive! That's odd. Floppy drives have their own USB subclass and protocol, but this camera just pretends to be a regular removable drive.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

probably because it also works for memory stick, maybe? Does it? lemme check.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

Yup. It even tells you which mode it's in. Which is important, because the camera can have both media inside it at the same time.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

also this random memory stick that I grabbed out of my memory card box happened to have been used in a mavica (or maybe another camera?) before! it's got pictures on it. pictures of pictures. meta. If the dates can be trusted, these were taken on April 24th, 2004.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

interestingly, the camera doesn't do anything different if you are recording to memory stick. You still get 320x240 at 25fps, and 15 seconds maximum (and minimum) video length.

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

also the video seems to have an audio track? but it's silent. I wonder if that's normal or if maybe the microphone on this camera is broken. if it has one?

foone

@Foone

Apr 22, 2022

also, I checked: it doesn't like using Memory Stick Duo adapters, and especially doesn't like chaining those into a microSD card

Replying to

and

As this tweet appeared in front of my eyes I was about to open YouTube to find this video thinking you *must* have seen it but maybe I should link it just in case 😅

Replying to

and

I have the YE Data 4x USB floppy drive. It does say 4x on the case, and it does write at 4x. These were readily available and reasonably inexpensive when I bought mine. Had I known they were going to become unobtanium, I would have bought a dozen.