Petition for Samsung NX1 hack

[lucabutera]

I want to thank all the guys who are working hard for our project to make great cameras Samsung NX1, and younger sister NX500.
Samsung one year ago, has introduced them in the market as spaceships and then abandoned them in our hands.
Internal Technology Samsung nx1 and NX500 (28mp BSI sensor, Drime V and Drime Vs engine processor, HEVC codec) is superior than all cameras which are still planned.
it is my belief to think that the processing power allows recording 4k in 4.2.2. without difficulty or 4k Raw internal recording and beyond.

[raj90]

Hi everyone

first of all i would like to thank everyone who is involved in the hacking !! amazing talent !!

and i would i like to request some hacks which will be useful to everyone 

1. AFAIK video settings cannot be saved into the custom modes on the dial..

so if there is a way to save video settings such UHD or 1080 120fps into the custom modes..

it will easy to switch between the modes without having to goto the settings menu.

 

thank you.

[ricardo_sousa11]

1 hour ago, raj90 said:

Hi everyone

first of all i would like to thank everyone who is involved in the hacking !! amazing talent !!

and i would i like to request some hacks which will be useful to everyone 

1. AFAIK video settings cannot be saved into the custom modes on the dial..

so if there is a way to save video settings such UHD or 1080 120fps into the custom modes..

it will easy to switch between the modes without having to goto the settings menu.

 

thank you.

Id pay for this as well !

[vaga]

Perhaps you can try decreasing the # of frames for the GOP? Curious how that and bitrate are separate. But that is a good thing (allows for more tweaking and flexibility with the codec).

What is this "not a multiple of 8"? 4096, 2160 are multiples of 8, and so is 80mbps...

[Otto K]

@raj90 @ricardo_sousa11 you can kinda  already do that by putting settings in EV_RIGHT.sh and similar files and using keyscan utility documented in github repo. 

[vasile]

7 hours ago, Chant said:

Some interesting tidbits found tonight. 

"setpath    0 - 2(0:OTF/1:IPCout/2:RawOut/3:Ldc Out/4:120FPS OTF/5:120FPS IPC out
        6:120FPS Raw Out/7:120FPS Ldc Out/8:panorama/9:MFZoom)"
"sensorframerate    12,15,20,24,25,30,40,50,60,100,120,240
        outputframerate    12,15,20,24,25,30,40,50,60,100,120,240
dataframerate      12,15,20,24,25,30,40,50,60,100,120,240"

Still looking for the encoder though. To confirm srp or other hardware. But the closer it gets. And then the real fun happens!

I can look into the nx500 firmware deeper after I do the nx1 and see what can be added or changed. I do have a want for a nx500 b cam, especially as a gopro stand in due to them being cheaper! Make everyone want this samsung gear now that they cant get them. Maybe it was samsungs plan all along.

Edit

"HEVC Encoder
%s:%s(%d)> Width(%d) or height(%d) is not multiple of 8
%s:%s(%d)> HEVC[%d] Cfg WH %dx%d %d, BR:%dkbps GOP:%d > size 0x%x > return %d"

the full sensor read out should be possible with this also notice gop setting and bit rate.

 

I will have to look at the encoder.cpp file which is where things get more complicated but this is very good news.

Please let me know if you want the NX1 and NX500 encoder and decoder .bin files. They are separate files stored in the file system and dynamically loaded to the SoC when needed.

[MountneerMan]

11 hours ago, Otto K said:

I'm mostly poking around and finding out what Samsung engineers already made but is not exposed through standard menu or keys. This is nowhere near actual "firmware hacking", but there's some useful stuff there.

I'm actually trying not to hack the firmware. I'm just too afraid to end up with even the nx500 sized brick  

I have not tried any of the hack yet but I agree that I would prefer to not touch the original firmware and not need to flash anything to the cameras internal memory.

IMO the idea hack (if possible) would be somewhere in between what both of you are doing with the ability to reboot into a separate OS from the SD card.

Chant, from what you have seen do you think it would be possible to do this or do you think you would need to flash something new to the camera?

[vasile]

http://***URL removed***/forums/thread/3980221#forum-post-57456639

:-)

[jagnje]

If he can get the flat profile of the nx1 on there as well I'm buying it asap.

[Chant]

2 hours ago, MountneerMan said:

I have not tried any of the hack yet but I agree that I would prefer to not touch the original firmware and not need to flash anything to the cameras internal memory.

IMO the idea hack (if possible) would be somewhere in between what both of you are doing with the ability to reboot into a separate OS from the SD card.

Chant, from what you have seen do you think it would be possible to do this or do you think you would need to flash something new to the camera?

That is hard to say, might be able to load something like magic lantern, but the way the camera uses the .cpp files firmware wise make it limiting in what can be done. ML uses a modded firmware with a boot flag to enable what they use. But can be added to the list of things to look into. There will probley be a few variations of firmware, I found a log file of what they did to test and try to break the firmware so imitating it could be helpful.

 

30 minutes ago, vasile said:

http://***URL removed***/forums/thread/3980221#forum-post-57456639

:-)

With luck  that will be possible! The di-camera-app is interesting. I found the package info for it last night as well. 

 

15 minutes ago, jagnje said:

If he can get the flat profile of the nx1 on there as well I'm buying it asap.

Flat or log or cine gamma. All similar but not if you know what I mean. My want is for something to be similar to red.

[vasile]

http://***URL removed***/forums/post/57456860

:-)

[Chant]

42 minutes ago, vasile said:

http://***URL removed***/forums/post/57456860

:-)

Awesome, do you have a stream parser so you can compare the two bitrates?  zond 265 worked for me. They have trials as most are very costly. Do a sample with the before and after frame rate and then see what the analyzer says. This is a step for sure!

[j_one]

Just popping in to say thanks and cheers to all the time and effort you all are putting towards these two cameras.  Kudos to you all and whatever you guys come up with and decide to share.

[Geoff CB]

1 hour ago, vasile said:

http://***URL removed***/forums/post/57456860

:-)

Seriously give me a paypal donate button if you succeed. My hat's off to you sir.

[jagnje]

1 hour ago, Chant said:

That is hard to say, might be able to load something like magic lantern, but the way the camera uses the .cpp files firmware wise make it limiting in what can be done. ML uses a modded firmware with a boot flag to enable what they use. But can be added to the list of things to look into. There will probley be a few variations of firmware, I found a log file of what they did to test and try to break the firmware so imitating it could be helpful.

 

With luck  that will be possible! The di-camera-app is interesting. I found the package info for it last night as well. 

 

Flat or log or cine gamma. All similar but not if you know what I mean. My want is for something to be similar to red.

Well if you manage to get red kind of raw out of it I will consider you a godlike being

[Geoff CB]

http://***URL removed***/forums/thread/3980221#forum-post-57456639

"Duration: 00:00:35.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 75059 kb/s
Stream #0:0(eng): Video: hevc (Main) (hvc1 / 0x31637668), yuvj420p(pc, bt709), 2560x1440, 74864 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 120k tbn, 120k tbc (default)"

 

 

[vasile]

2 minutes ago, Geoff CB said:

http://***URL removed***/forums/thread/3980221#forum-post-57456639

"Duration: 00:00:35.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 75059 kb/s
Stream #0:0(eng): Video: hevc (Main) (hvc1 / 0x31637668), yuvj420p(pc, bt709), 2560x1440, 74864 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 120k tbn, 120k tbc (default)"

I also uploaded the zond demo screenshot for the file.

[Geoff CB]

1 minute ago, vasile said:

I also uploaded the zond demo screenshot for the file.

I saw Your amazing man, job very well done!

[Otto K]

@SMGJohn

di-camera-app is leaking (not freeing after use properly) a small amount of RAM every frame it processes. Normally this is not an issue since it does not exhaust the available RAM in 30 minutes, but with time restriction lifted you hit it at ~75min. There are two options to fix this - find a memory leak and fix it in di-camera-app binary (hard) and this possible quick hack if you (or somebody else) is willing to try - create and enable swap file and use it (leaked memory is no actually used and can be safely moved to swap). For some reason swap file on SD card is not working (swap partition might, but it's too much work for an average person), but there is a writeable partition in camera already with ~2GB free, mounted on /opt/usr, so this might help:

First to see hwo things look before (all commands from telnet session):

[root@drime5 ~]£ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        511580     499896      11684          0       5260      70556
-/+ buffers/cache:     424080      87500
Swap:            0          0          0
[root@drime5 ~]£ df -h /opt/usr
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p14       2.3G  105M  2.1G   5% /opt/usr

OK, so we have no swap and have plenty of free disk space on /opt/usr, let's create some swap:

[root@drime5 ~]£ dd if=/dev/zero of=/opt/usr/swap bs=1M count=512
512+0 records in
512+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB) copied, 42.882 s, 12.5 MB/s
[root@drime5 ~]£ mkswap /opt/usr/swap
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 524284 KiB
no label, UUID=63995c82-cf71-43c6-ae32-34e520e7e280

Ouch, internal storage is not very fast... Let's turn it on:

[root@drime5 ~]£ swapon /opt/usr/swap
[root@drime5 ~]£ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        511580     506540       5040          0       4404      82108
-/+ buffers/cache:     420028      91552
Swap:       524284          0     524284
[root@drime5 ~]£ df -h /opt/usr
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p14       2.3G  617M  1.6G  29% /opt/usr

Yup, it works

You have to do everything before swapon only once, after that (and after every reboot) you only have to re-enable the swap with swapon /opt/usr/swap

I hope sombody with enough free time tests this, I have a good feeling.

[vaga]

I think vasile's idea of using the existing menu and then just overriding the bitrate values that Samsung has assigned to the options is probably the best option because it is the most integrated. Another potential option could be to add a menu option to pull up the keyboard and ask for a custom setting of resolution, frame rate, bitrate (and maybe anything else necessary like video profile).

We should try to avoid out of place, unintegrated UI if possible. It just adds clutter. 

 

@vasile can you explain what tbn and tbc are?

 

Also, can you check if there is a flag or something in the Dev menu that lets Samsung know if the video time limit has ever been disabled? (Assuming of course that you can uncheck the box in the menu).