A few days ago, I mentioned theFlip video recording device. It reminded me of the CVS one-time-use “camcorder” (I use that term loosely). Yesterday, I ran into an old friend who has a propensity for tearing things apart and he too mentioned the old CVS camcorders. We both agreed that their best application is “hazardous duty” situations.

The conversation and the post got me thinking so I dug out the old hacked CVS camcorder and downloaded the Ops software from sourceforge. Within 2 minutes I was downloading video clips from the “little plastic device”.

I recorded a 10 second clip of the clock (no big surprise). FYI – The camcorder records in DivX format.

I saw a strange ad on TV this evening and only at the end did I understand the product pitch. They were selling theFlip. I recognized it immediately. It was an upgrade of the CVS one-time use camcorder. Like the CVS version, theFlip has a fixed lens. The big different is it is 640×480 video rather than the CVS 320×240. The second difference is that it has a USB interface to download the video. *BUT* this second difference is not as big as you may think. It is very easy to hack the CVS one-time use to add a USB plug and software to download the video is free on the web.

I bought one of these CVS one-time use cameras for about $20. It took me about 15 minutes to hack it and another 5 minutes to install the software and download the first video. It worked as documented on the Internet.

Would I recommend it to others ? It’s good if you need to put a video camera in harms way. Otherwise, there a a lot of better options. Most point-and-shoot cameras can shoot video. Most reasonably modern digital camcorders can download to a computer. And if you want the smoothest of solutions, there are a number of current camcorders that record to a hard disk and will make downloading a breeze.