I recently sold my entire DVD collection in order to buy some things I’d actually use around the house. On top of a small upgrade for my desktop computer, I also purchased a new Samsung NV24HD Point and Shoot Camera. I decided that I wanted a Point and Shoot in addition to my SLR because it seemed silly lugging around a giant camera and lens when going to simple events such as a friends birthday party.

One of the selling points for me on the Samsung NV24HD was the fact that it was able to capture high definiton video in 720p (1280×720, MPEG-4 H.264). Combine this with the 16GB Transcend SDHC memory card I bought to use with it, and I now had a point and shoot camera AND an HD video camera that could record over five hours of HD content.

After a couple test trials using my cat among other things, I started to notice when playing back the files using Quicktime on my computer that the video seemed fairly choppy and also the audio would drop out and then come back from time to time.

My first suspect was the memory card thinking that it might not be fast enough to record the video. But the Transcend 16GB SDHC card I purchased was certified Class 6 SDHC (guaranteed minimum 6mbps), which is the fastest you can buy for SDHC cards, so that couldn’t be the issue.

I then tried perhaps using another computer to play back the file, so I fired up my wife’s Black MacBook and used Quicktime on her machine. I had the same issue of choppy playback (at the beginning of the file) as well as the audio dropping out at the same points.

I suspect one of three things:

1. This is an incompatibility with the MP4 files generated by the NV24HD and Quicktime, which I should probably e-Mail and ask Samsung about.
2. It’s an issue with the memory card I’m using not being able to keep up with the recording device and thus losing data while recording video.
3. It’s an issue with the NV24HD itself or an issue with the hardware encoder that’s used to compress the H.264 video stream.

I imagine it takes a bit of CPU power to compress video to 720p real time, and it’s evident on the NV24HD because after shooting continuous video for over five minutes the camera gets noticeably warmer.

ANYWAYS, if you have experienced this issue or have some ideas for a remedy I’m all ears

Cheers!