Hi all,

I currently own an MD-80 mini HD cam, tenner buy from ebay. At the moment it has a battery life of four hours fully charged and will take a maximum of 8GB ( I believe) which equals about 4 hours of footage.

Now I was wondering with what I currently have am I able to expand the battery life maybe up to 24hours and a record time to match. So I was wondering if I am able to hack it to extend these attributes? The purpose I need it for means I can have an additional space of 7inches w X 4 inches h X 1 inch d.

If there is another camera out there that can already do this in the size requirements, under £50 and standalone so once I press record I can leave it and it will continue to record till I press stop?

If you need anymore infor I have a screw driver and the camera next to my desk.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Mini-DV-DVR-Sport ... 3f0501698f

I guess there are several options:

1. If you do not have to be mobile, just consider having it always plugged to a wall socket.

2. Ask the hardware vendor if they have larger battery for your model (they often do).

3. Build your own battery. You should be able to find several web sites on how to build your own laptop battery. It is pretty similar case, so you might consider reading one of those. You would need voltage and power parameters of your current battery as well as several high-capacity battery cells.

4. You could make use of your battery in two ways: rip off your current battery and replace cells (this will obviously void any warranty) or use it instead of power supply to charge it (less effective but you do not risk killing you battery).

5. Buy a dedicated external battery to plug instead of a power supply. You could even try to adapt some small computer UPS.

6. Reduce power consumption for example by disabling (if possible / acceptable) LCD display during recording.