I too am having trouble getting the camera to do anything other than say "No Valid Picture to Play" when I hit the play button. I have followed directions meticulously and am using aquamotion on a GH2 delivered yesterday. Card is Sandisk extreme class 10 previously formatted in camera with GH__v11.bin loaded 15,234 kb showing in root directory. ????

Okay, got it to work, changed increment number to 2 as Vitaliy suggested a few days back. Yaaay

Thanks

So I'm a very happy GH13 user and GH2 owner and I've been playing with GH2 hacks. I shoot almost exclusively with 720 at 60P AVCHD by the way. The TerraQuake has been a lot of fun but it's more bit rate than I need and filling up a 16gb card in 24 minutes is overkill for how I use these videos.
I tried taking TerraQuake and using a lower bitrate like in cbrandins 44 but the IQ just wasn't right - in fact the stock setting looked better!

I'm wondering if someone could point me towards an AVCHD 720/60P hack somewhere in between the stock and most awesome you guys have been developing? Maximum versatility and stability are paramount.

Thanks!
Tim

@driftwood I'm sorry to say I'm still having troubles with my card with terraquake. It did get me up from about 10 seconds maximum record time before card read error to between 15 and 30 seconds. I guess I will try one of the lower hacks and see what happens.

I've looked around no these threads and have to ask. Has anyone had any success with an hdmi to composite cable for use as a monitor? I am starting a feature shoot in a couple weeks and need a reliable monitor. don't have much money for an expensive HDMI monitor, and I have seen lots of monitors with A/V inputs for cheap. Has anyone had any success? I know last time I saw a question like this asked, no one had any luck, but its been a while, so thought i would ask again.

@mee yeah try terraquake

@mee right click/format/uncheck quick format.

Regarding my question some days ago, about patching the firmware to cancel the acceleration behavior on the focus ring: my goal is to try to control this ring from a motor controlled by some device (step motor on arduino most likely) and then let a PC adjust the focus to a given position (user controlled or programmed). That's a toy project. However, due to the focus ring behavior (I lack the appropriate term for that) in the standard firmware, the speed of the ring rotation does not linearly adjust the lens focus distance. A slow speed make very little move, while a moderate speed move is a lot faster in comparison. We might need to emulate the acceleration slope on the PC side to predict how to rotate the ring automatically to react a given focus distance.. which is not easy and not necessary precise enough.

Sure, a simple solution is to use a lens with manual focus ring to avoid all theses problems, but I don't have such a lens. I would like to use the Panasonic 14-140 I already own.

Is there a hope to find a way to hack the manual focus control in the firmware?

My understanding about going back to original v1.0E firmware.

To do this you must still load the original GH2__V10.bin into Ptools. Don't change anything except leave the version increment checked so it is at least 1 ie 10E->10F Now save the file as GH2__V1x.bin where x can be anything but 0 as to not overwrite your original file.

This patched file now will trick the firmware loader into thinking it is a newer version and burn it. The patch in the file that Vitaly has placed will not actually allow the loader to update the firmware version number in the flash. So essentially you're at the original code version and ready to patch again or with any newer firmware greater than 10E that Panasonic decides to release.

You can see this by checking the body version in the settings even with a file with patches. It's always at 1.0

Please correct me if I have this all wrong.

I haven't tried this because I'm happy with the patching so far.

Great stuff. Thank you.

Hi, I am new here and I am wondering what is the most stable GH2 hack?

Also, is the new ISO hack stable with a higher bit rate? Which bit rate is best with the ISO hack?
I am super eager to hack my GH2 but dont want to mess with it too much as I am not very tech savvy.

Sorry if this has already been answered, I looked around and couldnt find any definitive answers.

Thanks a lot!

OK, clear wind: How do we get the original firmware back? AKA RESET.

Thank Juice

Hmm, this happened to me too! :/

@smoke23

I think (pretty darn sure) you only load the original firmware into the camera; NO adjustments, NO Ptools.

Then you are back to original. But if you want to load a patch it doesn't matter what number the .bin file has.

Just go with any number that is not original firmware name i.e.: "GH2__V10.bin"...

Numbers up to_99 seem to be ok, but why you need that?

We can stick with GH2__V11.bin, ad infinitum :D We can update patch anyhow, this does not seem to matter (this was my confusion about version increment - and we only have to tick version increment, doesn't mean we HAVE to incremet the number all the time).

in Ptools: just leave version increment as is =1 (but ticked...) (I also did not really understand this but never really change that if you don't do real hardcore testing)


You get it? maybe this will change when Pana release the new firmware and hack changes, we will see here. ;)

AMI I RIGHT YOU GUYS?????