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.

[Stan Jelavic]

The scans I took with the Movie Maker Pro are 1440x180 at around 8mbps and 20FPS. As Jacek said it the artifacts will be there no matter what you do. The artifacts are caused by high MP4 compression and they also double the image size digitally which adds to the problem. The design came out of the dashcam and that is the reason for low quality and small storage space. The chip driving the sensor is Novatek NT96650. Looking at the chip spec there is no provision of extracting individual frames. My suggestion is go with a good projector and add you own camera to it. The Wolverine Hawkeye mod that I built is pretty expensive and you are still stuck with the sub quality Wolverine transport.