Sony camera 15-sec video limit.

[someguy]

First let me say that I suck at searching for anything, so sorry if this is covered somewhere. I did look.

I have a Sony DSC-S70, and when recording video, it has a maximum record time of only 15 seconds. What am I supposed to do in 15 seconds that is worthy of filming?

Is there any way at all (hack, firmware update, workaround, etc) that I can record for longer?

My girlfriend has a LG Chocolate phone with a default video setting of 15 seconds, but it has the option to change to unlimited I believe (with the obvious restriction of available storage).

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Anonymous Freak]

First let me say that I suck at searching for anything, so sorry if this is covered somewhere. I did look.

I have a Sony DSC-S70, and when recording video, it has a maximum record time of only 15 seconds. What am I supposed to do in 15 seconds that is worthy of filming?

Is there any way at all (hack, firmware update, workaround, etc) that I can record for longer?

My girlfriend has a LG Chocolate phone with a default video setting of 15 seconds, but it has the option to change to unlimited I believe (with the obvious restriction of available storage).

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Nothing you can do about it.

It's from a very old limitation: The capacity of a floppy disk.

Sony's first digital still cameras were the "Mavica" line that recorded onto floppy disks. When they added a movie mode, it recorded in 320x240, 15 frame per second MPEG-1 that produced a file size of just under 1.4 MB for a 15 second clip. You could also choose a miniscule 160x120 to record for 60 seconds.

When they moved to flash memory, the 'guts' of the camera were still drawn from the floppy-based Mavica, including the processor and buffer memory. So the 15 second limitation stayed for quite a while, even after they added higher-quality movie modes that produced a larger-than-1.4 MB file for 15 seconds.

Thankfully, they got rid of the 15 second limit a while ago (but not before your model, unfortunately for you.)

There is ZERO way to bypass this limit. (For a quick comparison, my DSC-W100 still has 160x120 mode available, and with a 2 GB memory card, I can record for a whopping 24 hours, 57 minutes, 32 seconds.)

 

[someguy]

Damn. Thanks for the information.