Thanks for the hack Vitaliy, great work...sorry but I have to ask, because a lott of people in the RC world are waiting for it, and I read you did something with hdmi but:
Live view through composite during video recording (ever going to be) possible ???

Hi, I was quite excited to read all this too, so I loaded the new firmware onto my GH2 - but something weird has happened: it seems to have bricked ... my SD-card?!?
Settings I used were:
- Version incr.
- 30min limit ...
- PAL <->NTSC
- 720p compr: E3 Quality, E3 Table
- Microphone: Volume Indic 1-8 all checked (wanted to try that, without fully understanding, so don't know if this makes sense but it's probably not relevant here anyway...)

Upgrading firmware went fine, then inserted another class10 sdhc (Transcend 16GB); tried to record 720p footage which apparently worked - but when inserting the card into my mac, it didn't show up. It's recognized in the camera (although 1 time I tried it wasn't, but usually it is), but it's never recognized on the mac - other cards are, so it's not the card reader...
I mean could theoretically also be a coincidence, like the card was already broken before and I just didn't notice until now - but then it's strange, the cam still recognizes the card...
Mac doesn't tell me either, there's some unidentified flying storage device or whatever, just completely ignores it...

So I'm curious, if anyone has an idea, how this can be caused, or whether this will be happening to more people (hopefully not!) - apart from that, it's great the FW-hack worked out and I'm also very curious of things still to be developed :-)

@zigizigi >> If so, codec tweaking is of no help here - the 50i will be always behind in terms of apparent resolution. It's just made so.

I'm afraid you're right

@mpgxsvcd >> Whenever we try to raise the max bit rate it keeps the average bit rate the same.

Unfortunately i've made the same experience. So at the moment the hack does not provide a better image quality. Hope to see 25p or 50p soon.

Bought a Japanese model. Just a heads up as the US models seem to be Made in China and the Japan and Taiwan models - made in Japan. On my various GH13s, the best picture was out of a Made in Japan GH1 2010.
You can buy Gh2 from Japan from Amazon.co.jp or Rakuten.co.jp (dont select international)
Use Google Chrome or add-ons for language translation.
Then use Tenso.com for shipping. You have to use DHL due to the Lithium battery.
922 USD before shipping.

@cinegraphy
First, no one can tell you why you card behave such. May be you have problems with your Mac reader (bad contact and contacts on card are already quite worn). Use other card.

>for instance searching for "Volume", so tweaking microphone sensitivity

Look at the hits at the right. They have enough description for this setting.
If you do not understand, you can always ask.

Do you know if my Lexar Platinum II class 6 cards are good for using with this hack. If so, what is the maximum video bitrate that I can use with those. They are stated as 100x write speed. On their official website it says "speed up to class 10". I have 3 card, each 32 GB and I cannot afford right now to buy some class 10 ones.

But will be helped if I could understand the tip about AGC level: "high and low bytes play different roles" By byte you intend first or second digit of the number ? What about the third digit (as the one in original level 4 AGC)? Do you think one digit is for sensitivity and second for limiter level ?

Word consists from two bytes.
Like 0xAABB consist from 0xAA and 0xBB. As you can see I am talking about hex representation.
You can see hex in Ptool also.
It is easy to see that AGC 3 and AGC 2 settings differ only in Hi byte - 0x010A instead of 0x000A.

Hi Vitaly,

first, thank you for your great work.

unfortunately I did not have the gh1, so i don't have any experiences to hack a camera.

The current patch version is for testers to find out whats possible with the camera, correct?
Comes the next version with functioning settings, how long has it lasted to have the final settings for the GH1?

Thanks, Nitro

> Only the max. clip length is always 2:39 min., is there any way we can remove this limit?

Most probably no. It is 2Gb file size limit :-)

>About screenshots

Check your format. Use PNG with normal size and all will work.

looks good lpowell, just in time. now the testing starts

News about AGC settings; 2 last digits in hexadecimal are concerning the sensivity: 00 is the most sensitive, FF is the least. I'm following exploring the 2 first digits, I haven't found how to disable the limiter (which is the condition to be able to calibrate the modulation) yet.

Ahhrgh, somehow uploading images doesn't work here, is there another magic trick, apart from png...? Cropped it to make it smaller, but still around 500k - shouldn't be the problem though I think... Also tried jpg, bmp...

@theshooter
you are in too much of a hurry. Vitaliy has stated HDMI output is not No. 1 priority. My guess is that after we get a hang on how the encoder behaves so we can get reliable higher bitrates and get proper 25p, which are top priority, then other improvements will be investigated further.