If you have read my editorial in the December issue of EEPN, you know that I was excited to discover a gadget called a VMCR (Video Memory Card Recorder) at a pre-CES press event I attended in November. I noticed it at the SanDisk booth. Called the V-Mate, it was one of the products at the event that received a 2007 CES Innovation Award. I thought it would be a cool replacement for my aging VCR.
I talked with a spokesperson at the booth to find out more. As I listened and watched, the V-Mate seemed to be recording and displaying video perfectly. Oftentimes, a product like this is offered to editors for review. Obviously, I’m not affiliated with a consumer publication, but sometimes I’ll take a look at a consumer product to gain a better understanding of how certain technologies are performing in the real world. In this case, no offer of a review unit was made, which was fine with me. But I found out during my discussion that the V-Mate had not made it into the big electronic retail chains in time for the holidays. At this point, I should have put two and two together, but I didn’t. Instead, I wrote about it in my December editorial and then purchased a unit for just under $100 from Amazon.com.
The V-Mate is small enough to fit into a VCR tape jacket and seems to offer all the benefits of a VCR and then some. I expected to be able to record and playback video to a TV, though the product is primarily marketed for video playback on other devices, such as personal media players and cell phones. It accepts a variety of memory cards, including inexpensive SD cards. The V-Mate does not come with a memory card, so I purchased a 2 GB SanDisk Ultra SD card for $14.99 (after rebate).
Setup is simple, with analog in, analog out and power the only connections needed to get started. There’s also a mini remote control that comes with the V-Mate. The problems become apparent shortly after you power up the unit. A blue screen (similar to a VCR) is the first display that you see, asking for date and time input. No problem here. But the screen never goes away, like with a VCR. Instead, you are moved into a menu system. If you choose RECORD, you get a preview screen that’s about half the size of your normal screen. If you press OK on the remote, the screen goes blank except for an REC on the display. So you can’t watch the program as you’re recording as you can do with a VCR.
So the user interface leaves something to be desired. How about the video quality? Recording with the “TV and PC” setting and playing video back on either device gives terrible results. I’ll add the caveat “as of this writing” since I’m in the process of dealing with tech support and a technical representative from SanDisk to find out if the problem is with my particular unit or not. So far, technical support has told me that I should download the latest version of the software to solve the problem. I did this, but the results were the same. Essentially, the problem is dropped frames and other digital video artifacts.
These problems got me wondering what chips were used to develop the V-Mate, since we cover a lot of different ones in EEPN. Turns out SanDisk used Broadcom’s VideoCore BCM2724 mobile multimedia processor and BCM59001 Power Management Unit.
Here’s something else that happened. At the CES Show in Las Vegas last week, I noticed that SanDisk was showing the V-Mate in its booth. So I went up to the guy who was demonstrating the device and told him about the problems I was having. The first thing he asked me was if I had the latest version of the software. This leads me to believe that Broadcom is selling the chip without software support such as video codecs. It also makes me think that SanDisk is working feverishly to get their software right. I was told to expect a new release of the software sometime soon.
One more thing to talk about: I was lead to believe that a 1 GB memory card could hold more than three hours of video and a 2 GB card about seven hours. As it turns out, in the TV and PC mode, my 2 GB card holds just under two hours—I didn’t catch the end of the movie I was recording. According to SanDisk, 7.1 hours on a 2.0 GB card is based on an average bit rate of 544 Kbps. You can achieve this by selecting the H.263 format (3GP or 3GPP2) and 320x240 pixels resolution. But if you read the press release from Broadcom for the design win, it says: The SanDisk V-Mate media recorder allows users to record onto a flash storage card up to 3.5 hours of high-quality video per gigabyte, using a range of industry-standard video formats to optimize user experience across a range of mobile devices. With a maximum recording resolution of VGA 640 x 480 pixels, the V-Mate generates media files optimized for playback on popular mobile devices such as the Palm Treo, Sony PSP, and other flash card-enabled mobile devices, including notebook PCs. (You can read the entire release at www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=929307.) I can vouch for the fact that you do not get high-quality video on a notebook or desktop PC.
I was curious to see other reviewer’s comments about the V-Mate, so I checked out Gizmodo (www.gizmodo.com). Turns out they never reviewed the product, just wrote up the hype as I did in my December editorial. And the reader’s comments didn’t provide any insight either.
Where do I stand with this? I’m still talking to SanDisk about the V-Mate. The support person over there asked for a video clip that shows the problems that I’m getting. Why would he want this, I’m wondering. Can’t he produce lousy video with his own V-Mate? But, I’ll give SanDisk the benefit of the doubt and hope that it truly is my particular V-Mate that’s bad. If you want to take a look for yourself, just click on the link: V-Mate Video for PC and TV. It’s a 9-MB (10 seconds) clip from the movie The Wedding Crashers.
That’s it for now, but I will add an addendum when I find out more information. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t record video from the V-Mate to be used on a portable device such as the Sony PSP mentioned above (I'll ask my nephew if I can borrow his). If this works out well, I’ll have to give the V-Mate some good marks, but it won’t change my feelings about the user interface.
I visited my nephew, Sean Dowd, today to test out a V-Mate recorded file on his PSP. In preparation for the visit, I recorded a rather lengthy segment of the movie Cheaper by the Dozen. I used a 512 MB Pro Duo card that I pulled out of my Sony Cyber-shot digital camera. As I was recording to it (just by picking Sony PSP off a menu), I noticed that the screen did not blank out during recording as it does for "TV and PC." As I was watching the recording take place, it seemed to me that the recording was not going too well, since the TV screen was showing some video artifacts like the screen breaking up during quick motions.
But today, when I popped the card into Sean's PSP, the video played perfectly. Score one for the V-Mate. Sean wasn't home at the time, so I took the card out and waited for him to come home. I was anxious to see his response. When I handed my 9-year old nephew the memory card and asked him to put it in his PSP, he looked at it and said, "I have one of these already." I told him this was different. There was a movie on the card. It took some time to register, but then he took out the card he had, popped mine into his player and turned on the movie. His face lit up. "This rocks," he exclaimed. The audio coming through the speakers was not loud enough, but when he added headphones, the sound was fine.
It looks like SanDisk nailed the PSP part of their video offering, and I'll assume for now that other kinds of portable players would do as well. Getting a movie onto a PSP might be an easy task for some, but I checked one site and it looked like somewhat of a hassle (http://www.gamespot.com/features/6120996/index.html?type=tech). With the V-Mate, it's a cinch to do. But at $50 or so for a 2 MB Pro Duo memory card, kids like Sean need to realize that movies have to be moved on and off the card to avoid having to buy more than one.
One last thing. Since the file is 76 MB, I won't be offering it for download, but the MPEG-4 file does play in a QuickTime player, and it looks every bit as good on the PC (in normal size) as it does on the PSP.
Electronic Design China 
