Introduction

I recently came up with a firmware modification for these scanners which causes them to produce video of a significantly higher quality than usual. The modification involves restricting the Quantization Parameter (QP) of the H.264 codec used by the Novatek chips in these scanners to a maximum value of 17. In the H.264 video compression standard, QP values range from 0 (least compressed & lossless) to 51 (most compressed & worst quality). Using the modified firmware, scanning 50ft of film will result in an output of ~700MB and scanning 200ft of film will result in an output of ~3.0GB. I found that lowering the maximum QP further than 17 caused my Somikon HD-XL scanner to run out of memory while scanning several films. My guess is that this was due to the complexity of those films requiring bitrates higher than that possible using the available RAM. I haven’t had any such issues with a maximum QP of 17. I’m providing Wolverine and Wolverine Pro firmware images, however these haven’t been tested yet. The modified firmware produces videos with a framerate of 20fps. You might want to adjust this in your video editor if your film wasn’t shot at 20fps.

Sample video

Below is a sample video taken from a home movie filmed by a German family in the 1970s.
I scanned the 200ft reel of Super8 with my Somikon HD-XL film scanner running the modified firmware. The unedited video produced by the scanner was 3.1GB in size.

Firmware installation

Below are the firmware images that I have prepared for the various models of scanner.

Using these will most likely void your warranty. They can also potentially render your scanner inoperable. Proceed at your own risk!

Wolverine firmware
Wolverine Pro firmware
Reflecta / Somikon firmware

Once you have downloaded the .zip file corresponding to your scanner, extract the .bin file from it and copy this to an SD card. The formatting of and copying to the SD card apparently needs to be done on a Windows machine. Insert the SD card into the scanner and power it on. The red LED light below the power button will flash on and off. Wait for about 25 seconds, the GUI should appear. Remove the firmware image from the SD card either by using the Format option from the menu or by powering the scanner off, removing the SD card and transferring it to your computer to remove the file manually.

You should now be able to create high quality videos with your scanner.

Thanks

Thanks to Tobias for making available his Novatek firmware tools.
Thanks to Mac84 at tinkerdifferent.com for making available the firmware images that I used to create my modified firmware images.

Get in touch

My contact email is joe@hansom.dev. I would be interested in hearing how you get on with using the firmware.

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