Firmware hack for Wolverine 8mm film digitizer

[Shane Graber]

This link was posted on one of the Facebook groups I'm part of that uses the Wolverine and Kodak Reels film for 8mm / Super8 film conversion:

https://tinkerdifferent.com/resource...digitiser.145/

As I understand it, this hack allows someone to modify their Wolverine firmware to adjust the capture resolution, frame rate, and bitrate (compression). I have not (yet) tried this on my Wolverine, but I intend to within the next couple days. The author believes the optimum settings are width = 1440, height = 1080, fps = 20, and bitrate/2 = 17600. Any higher on the bitrate and the Wolverine will be overtaxed and not be able to function properly.

[Thomas Dafnides]

Do you know what the default bit rate is for the wolverine/kodak scanners? Curious , to know how much this increases it.

[Shane Graber]

Do you know what the default bit rate is for the wolverine/kodak scanners? Curious , to know how much this increases it.

He's not completely sure but thinks it was 960 x 720 with a bitrate of around 4000-5000.

[Jacek Kropinski]

Do you know what the default bit rate is for the wolverine/kodak scanners? Curious , to know how much this increases it.

I have the older Wolverine 720 version and have successfully used these hacks here:
https://retromania.pandelground.com/...al-moviemaker/

Looking at the bit rates and frame sizes, they seem similar to the hack above:

I believe the standard bit rate is quoted as 8,000 k/bs however, I was getting an actual 5 896 kb/s at 20 FPS. I guess it is not a constant bit rate because all my captures had a slightly different bit rate.

I experimented with the different versions of the retromania hack and found the best results came from the 1440×1080 version, where I get 16.5 Mb/s @ 30 FPS
But the compression artefacts are not lessened - if anything, they are increased with the higher bitrate - or, at any rate, more apparent because of the way the Wolverine card encodes/compresses the video.

It is CarDV-TURNKEY encoding = automotive dashcam, and there is no way of changing that unless you know how to take the camera feed and just let it create a still JPEG sequence rather than encoding it into an mov. Although JPEG is lossy, you can get great results with it as well.

I wish I knew how to do this. The Wolverine's goal seems to be a 'decent' looking video with minimum effort and fuss for the lowest common denominator, and this is a shame because, with the same components, they could have made a much better machine, such as Stan Jelavic , has evolved.
There is obviously a great demand for a low-cost but good-quality home movie scanner.