Pavel Mašek

Answer on my email:
 
The NX1 is certainly under consideration.
We almost did it last year, and then Samsung started pulling that camera from the shelves. 
It isn't sold in these parts anymore.
 
This is in discussion, but I can't promise anything at this stage.
We've had quite a few requests for this camera in the last week so hopefully we can push that through.

I think it depends on everyone's taste - someone prefers dynamic range (and more filmic?), someone likes richer and more accurate colours. I have almost same settings as Casey... I did not make any scientific tests but my opinion is that (with this limited bitrate and 8bit codec) it is best solution to get best picture straight out of camera. But please - let's focus on hacking of NX1 in this thread... :-)

Answer on my email:
 
The NX1 is certainly under consideration.
We almost did it last year, and then Samsung started pulling that camera from the shelves. 
It isn't sold in these parts anymore.
 
This is in discussion, but I can't promise anything at this stage.
We've had quite a few requests for this camera in the last week so hopefully we can push that through.

Tried some different LUTs with the NX1 today.
Im stuck at home guarding my dog after surgery, so this is what I can do for now basically.
 

Stoked to get my second NX1 this week. Meanwhile Im fiddling with old footage.
Its gamma DR and everything dial down half way accept sharpness thats all the way down. Then some grain in post really smooths the edges.
(it gets messed up again on the web of course)
 

Thank you. I have requested SDK too ... do not belive I will have luck, but better then nothing :-) (strange they need to know name of company, type of business, position,...etc.)

Its so we can shoot 4k and 4k crop, giving us 2 focal lengths per lens.
And it would likely minimize moire.

Higher bit rates and raw video is my dream for NX1. I love the raw out of this camera. It blows away anything my Canon is capable of. I've taken a grossly underexposed photo of the city in the dark and managed to pull out such ridiculous amounts of details that I thought it was voodoo.

This is so frikkin' cool to watch...

I know enough about software structures to understand what you're doing, but not enough to help. Damn fascinating to watch though..

Again - THANK YOU to everyone involved!
 

Well afaik the NX1 and the NX500 have different versions of the DRIMe V (NX1) DRIMe V-S(nx500) But I have the firmware of the nx500 which is of interest for me also, again cheap b camera and see what it can do and how much it can be pushed and sacrifice the length of life. But that is secondary to the NX1 for me. I can browse the FW in the next few weeks and see if things are vastly different though. See if the camera control files are written similarly/

I started this research when the nx1 first came out, saved and tracked the firmware, and then started digging into when the rumors of the exit started happening. The tech inside this camera is just magic. Compared to what other companies are doing its a few years ahead. And due to samsung being able to roll their own chips it seems they didnt cripple anything because it was too costly. Im not going anywhere! 

thx a lot. please don't disappear as others did ;-) 

It was written in the .cpp files showing the hz of the sd bus, this would be an incremental increase test that would just be raising it until it crashes or to the limit stated by the sd association. And if it changes depending on what type of file is being written to it. As well as tracking the sensor and chip heat out put to see if it is underclocked for a reason. Lots of fun.
 
 
Not at the point yet, still tearing it down. The base tizen didnt seem to change much through the updates. It was the control files for the camera, written in c and a whole new ball game. I do about 15 hours of work into this a week, which isnt much considering but things are moving. If you wanted me to just make hello world appear it wouldnt really prove much, at least not in the way that this camera works.

 
 
Have not got to that point yet, still diving into the code and doing a control file comparison, as the updates for the camera happened they state what they changed, and that is what the major key point of what Im doing is. Its one of the nexts steps though. 
 
I can update as I progress and post summaries of what I find. Just to find the rgb888 and lut info I had to look though about 15000 lines of code. Its tedious. But worth while for me in the end, so I will continue to dig and deconstruct. And update!

Hey, I am currently on a shoot for a music video for 3 - 4 days but I have checked my mail, if nothing I will personally contact Samsung regarding the SDK for the NX1 in the weekend.
My guess is its sensitive SDK with very deep hardware binding codes because no one has leaked it anywhere, which means Samsung is having you write a deal with them to keep it to yourself. I literally spent days searching for it without a single trace of it. 
I personally have no clue what this SDK is, what it looks like and what it does exactly, all I know is what I have read and heard there is no images of it either, Samsung is really keeping it close to the chest and I only read about some people having it, I tried contacting them but no answers. I highly recommend people go around try contact these people whom possess the SDK for the NX1.
I will take a wild guess and assume it looks something similar to the Tizen SDK but with more hardware control, I will just post the image of the Tizen SDK here, however realistically it probably wont be as amazing as we think but it might be a good start to construct our own set of developer tools.

I posted about the work Im doing on the firmware side of the nx1 a few pages back, but it was/still is hidden for some reason. 
**no longer hidden on page 11 at the bottom. Much more detail about what I have found on the camera.**
To sum it up, I have been working on this the better part of 6 months, didnt know anyone else was interested until I found this thread a bit over a week ago and posted my findings. Im at a point of comparing the changes in the firmware versions to see how the code is written. I have uncovered the bootloader, the file format and language used for their custom control files for tizen, info on lut, rgb 888, sd card bus speed(its quite low should be ush1 u3 but its not set close to the speed stated in the sd association docs) and a few more things. 
My goal is similar to what the guy said on the gh2 hack. I had a hacked 144mbs gh2 I used for 5 years until moisture killed it a few months ago. The tech inside the nx1 should be capeable of pushing the hevc and the sensor to the limit, even if it shortens the life by 4-5 years its still cheaper than a red by a magnitude.

Ideal goals for me are raw/compressed raw output, see if cdng or another compressed raw format would work. As red raw is just their version of jpeg2000 modded for cine work.
There is not a deadline I have set to finish this, as this is just one of many projects I have on the go but comparing it to other cameras its quite promising.

Yeah, another example is the 200mbps app for android.
In some cameras bitrate does wonders.
 

If I remember correctly from working with GH3 footage the banding was nowhere near as bad as on the Samsung NX1 of course Samsung fixed a lot of the shitty colour bleeding and terrible banding issues with the newest firmwares but the banding still persists, its there if you pay attention and you definitely will see it when you work with the files.
I can apply the LOG profile from EOSHD to the NX1 footage with the proper settings in place, if I push colours too much I see banding, I have some GH4 footage I shot before I sold it duo to the low light performance being unsatisfying, I can push the colours quite extreme without seeing any form of banding, even in the 1080p footage. Obviously the NX1 has way better colour range than the GH4 with Cine-D and I sadly its almost a year and half since I sold the GH4 and back then we had no idea there was an actual LOG profile coming for it at all, not even the news about the beta LOG being worked at. 
Its pretty clear its the HEVC codec doing it, I have reproduced some of the nastiness of the HEVC by using clean high bit depth images with gradients applied and noise in sections to see what the codec does to it, indeed the codec does cause banding at 8bit output, it also smoothens out noise in low detailed areas, I further checked with a still picture shot at 1600 ISO with some fine grains, again I see the same the codec smoothens out the flat areas, in high detailed areas it leaves but every area that has no details the codec smooths out, the earlier versions of HEVC were terrible at detecting detailed areas its gotten better. I will just assume here the NX1 uses the earlier version of the HEVC codec because its clearly destroying details in out of focus dark areas were the codec is struggling to detect details. It gets worse when you lower the video bitrate as well of course the in-camera noise reduction in video does not help at all just makes the issue far worse than it should be. 
Its managable but if we can turn off noise reduction in video, that would be a life saver for all of us because many of us does not have the luxury of light to shoot one or two stops over. Some of us are forced to shot stops under, its either that or very high ISO and we all know what happens then... 

Yes, I am not sure what it is but its not the codec because I have tested the HEVC codec multiple times it only washes out some of the fine grain in flat areas with no details to begin with in order to save bitrate, there is definitely some form of noise reduction in the video mode being applied, the noise reduction you you can turn on and off is generally just for photography but even then its not turned off completely. 
It really annoys me when I see a super cheap "(/#%#/# one inch sensor bridge camera have better noise grains than my NX1 and I actually just noticed it now that I shot on a FZ-1000 and compared it to the NX1 for fun, I noticed way more details in the darker areas on the FZ-1000 thanks to the 100mbps H264 codec Panasonic uses.
Panasonic has way more experience in video of course but it should not be an excuse for Samsung to force noise reduction in video on us like this. I like the video image so much, the APS sensor is perfect but if I loose details in dark areas on ISO of 400 in 4k, its not good enough and both cameras were underexposed by one or two stops. 

We need to disable the noise reduction in video, its killing me inside literally. You know its sad when the Panasonic FZ-1000 has better noise grain in 4k video than the NX1 which is just muffled mosquito noise, I had a look but could not find anything. Does anyone have any idea? 
I know the HEVC codec deals with fine grain texture poorly specially in my personal tests from converting Blu-Ray films to HEVC. 
But the NX1 has a nasty noise reduction in video which you cannot turn off and quite frankly its destroying details very badly. 

A simple script/hack (if possible) would be a script that runs when you boot the NX1/500 that would check to see if there is an external USB storage device(e.g. portable hard drive) and if there is one plugged in it would back-up all the files from the SD card onto the hard drive. I travel and climb alot and would like the ability to back-up my videos for redundancy on the go without needing to bring a laptop.
The stumbling block with this is from what I have read you need a USB OTG port witch I cannot find anywhere saying that the USB port on the NX1/500 is an OTG port.
But you got to admit if it were possible this would be an easy script to write(relatively) and would be quite useful.
 
P.S. I have been following this progress quite closely and applaud everyone's hard work. It is only a matter of time before more people get wind of how great these cameras are and how easy they are to hack and the fact you can get an NX500 kit for $799 USD new without any discounts.... oh man

Such an adapter, along with nx1/500 hacks, would make me a happy nx1 user for...10 years :-D 
 
http://***URL removed***/forums/post/57361842

Otto K and Marco - you are so great! Thank you... I am starting to believe that higher bitrate is possible... if 120fps1080p mode works on NX500.
See this (take from DPreview forum) - https://github.com/ottokiksmaler/nx500

Nice work Otto!
Looks like I was missing some major components when I was investigating the camera app. I was focusing on libmmf-camcorder, since di-camera-app definitely passes parameters like bitrate, resolution, time limit, etc. to that library. However after reading your posts on the dfmstool, I took a look at the strings in di-camera-app again, and it definitely includes the dfmsd commands and arguments. I'm rather confused as to how the two interact. I'll take a look at where those strings are used in the binary when I have the time.
Hopefully there will be some way to add the 1440p mode back into the GUI. The simplest way might be to replace one of the existing video modes in the menu with the 1440p mode. To do so someone will have to figure out exactly how the camera app calls dfms and mmf-camcorder in order to figure out the right constants and strings to change. That seems to be beyond me at least for the moment.
Otto K: are you planning on trying to install a modified firmware?

Argh! I typed a silly long post and then hit backspace outside of this box and ... poof ... it's gone
OK, shorter version:
If you start telnet server as described and connect to camera you can do following:
killall dfmsd; sleep 2; dfmsd -p &
This will kill original dfms daemon and start a new instance that we can now use by dfmstool command that sends commands to daemon like this:
dfmstool -s "this is a command"
Be careful, as soon as it encounters an invalid command it stops processing all other commands so we need to do killall... to restart it (it does not affect the camera state).
The command we want is sys_param movie size 2560_1440_30p. Yup, it's still in the firmware, it has no crop and it supports peaking. Why they removed it from the menu I have no idea. It's labelled as MJPEG on screen but it records HEVC as others and is limited to 29:59.
dfmstool -s "sys_param movie size 2560_1440_30p"
Here's what ffmpeg has to say (I have to find a way to set the quality as well):
Stream #0:1(eng): Video: none (hvc1 / 0x31637668), 2560x1440, 11280 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 120k tbn, 120k tbc
Oh, yeah, remember how there is no 1080p at 120fps in NX500? Think again:
dfmstool -s "sys_param movie size 1920_1080_120p"
And output of ffmpeg:
Stream #0:0(eng): Video: none (hvc1 / 0x31637668), 1920x1080, 38589 kb/s, 119.88 fps, 119.88 tbr, 120k tbn, 120k tbc
If you really want to you can put just the command in the nx_cs.adj file and call it a day (dfmsd will parse it and finish) or put a small script in test.sh that will do it for you (there is no touchscreen available while dfmsd is running). You could have SD cards for special video modes to simplify it.
For NX500 full list of modes is
4096_2160_24p
3840_2160_30p
2560_1440_30p
1920_1080_120p
1920_1080_60p
1920_1080_30p
1920_1080_24p
1920_1080_15p
1280_720_120p
1280_720_60p
1280_720_30p
640_480_60p
640_480_30p
For NX1, full list of modes is (yeah fractional ones too, don't know whether they are just for show or are there really differences between 24 and 23.98 when recorded)
4096_2160_24p
3840_2160_30p
3840_2160_24p
3840_2160_23_98p
1920_1080_120p
1920_1080_60p
1920_1080_30p
1920_1080_24p
1920_1080_23_98p
1920_1080_15p
1280_720_60p
1280_720_30p
640_480_60p
640_480_30p
Well, that's it for now, have fun

Just did a small video on some shots I had lying around, still testing rendering, but rendering in 4k def. makes it a lot better, still highly compressed though. Anyway hope you guys like it, not much love was put into grading on this one, unfortunately.