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.

"still up after twenty years, if you can believe that"

The microSD -> SD adapter -> CF adapter -> PCMCIA adapter was weirdly satisfying in a Rube Goldberg sort of way

I can't believe Sharp's website for this camera is still up after over 20 years.

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.

(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.

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.)

I wish more companies would keep their old web pages up indefinitely

Hitachi should be awarded a medal for still having the site up for that product. That is epic.

Multiple containers supporting the same codecs, containers supporting multple codecs, the opacity of containers, some acronyms meaning multiple things, some things having several acronyms... I swear to god, MPEG did everything they could think of to make this unfathomable to the average consumer.

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.

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

Can you believe the website is still up after 20 years?!

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.)

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.

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.

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.

36:58 What an award winning script for a sample video.

31:55 "Video Codecs get eaten alive by plants" sounds like an amazing B-movie, or an album name