SMGJohn

It's magic!
No, its the Megabyte (MB) and a Megabit (Mb) confusion:
https://opensignal.com/knowledgebase/the-difference-between-megabyte-and-megabit.php
https://www.google.de/search?q=megabyte+megabit+converter&gws_rd=cr&ei=463ZVumTOMb36ASKwp6wBg
The NX1 writes with 80 Mb/s and thats 10 MB/s
so possible is 60 MB and that's a 480 Mb Bitrate for the movie size.
 
Edit: But the Size of one 6.5k RAW-Picture is round about:
3:2-Format: 6.840 x 4.320 = 31,1 MB
6.840 x 3.648 = 26,2 MB * 24 Pics/s = holy s... that's impossibel!
 
But UHD with 400 to 480 Mbit/s vs. the original NX1 80 Mbit/s is a really heavy upgrade ... with 10 bit instead the 8 bit, i think it's a big thing.
 
 

If raw video gets unleashed through hacking, then all these questions will become 'the past'. Consider this: nx1 does 1) full sensor readout up to 60fps, then 2) scales it to 4k or 2k, then 3) encodes it in h.265 in real time.
Now...think about jumping steps 2 and 3 and just saving the raw sampled 6.5k image to sd card. Even if that were 12bit instead of 14, even if 24/25fps instead of 30/60, even if only for few minutes, this would be the greatest achievement ever in a sub 1000$ camera.
 
I would buy a couple of spare bodies if this ever happens.
 
 

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! 

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.

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.

New to the forum, but I have been working on the opening of the firmware for quite a few months. The second I heard about this camera coming from a modded gh2 I knew things were going to be fun.

I had plans to release what I found after having a stable custom build.

Good news after reading this thread as I seem to have quite a bit more discovered than most.

-bootloader
-3d lut info
-rgb888 info
And quite a few more things that make this an ideal camera to mod.

In the interview they basically implied they either had asics or fpgas built along side the arm cores.

"DE: When we were talking previously, you said that the architecture of DRIMe V is very different than DRIMe IV. What sorts of changes are made between them?
JK: The biggest change is the structure of the Image Signal Processor. The DRIMe V ISP is very different. Most ISPs have key parts of the processing hardwired to get the needed speed. What's really new with the DRIMe V is that the "hardwiring" can be reconfigured.
DE: That sounds very significant, although I have to admit I don't know how common it is that ISPs are actually hardwired.
JK: There's not much variability in them. Sometimes you'll get thresholding changes and small numeric variables, but the image path is usually very locked down...
DE: It's pretty much, a fixed pipeline.
JK: With a few tuning pieces, yeah.
DE: Whereas this is more configurable.
JK: Yes.
DE: And it's configurable not at the level of changing a firmware program, but you're actually changing the hardwiring. There are switches you can use to change the configuration of the functional units?
JK: Yeah, basically. And Samsung's software people are all over it; they're pretty sharp and I believe that we're really going to be able to tap fully into the DRIMe V's capabilities for the NX1.
DE: So even though it's hardwired, some of the connectivity is programmable through the firmware, so we can actually look for continued "firmware" development that would continue to improve performance, including the parts that are implemented in hardware.
JK: Yes.
DE: So there may be significant improvements in the near future. That's pretty interesting, because it sounds like it's already starting out pretty capable.
JK: And not just image quality, there's a lot going on in terms of programmability, like we talked about Samsung Auto-Shot mode before. Here's the UI for it."

TLDR: fpga or cpld or asic that can be reconfigd.

Now a few years ago samsung released info about adding fpgas into asics http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1200317
 
And have teamed up with Lattice on a few projects http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/04/which_oregon_company_has_a_chi.html
The back end camera control files seem to be written in .cpp so diving deep into the firmware to do a comparison of hex/string/hash changes and tracking the changes across the updates is what I am doing right now. And seeing which values can be modded. Recompiling is a different story but what it seems to be is that building a smiliar man in the middle to what magic lantern would be possible. Have a gui that would simialr to ptools in camera using the web browser capabilities.

Now this is not my full time work so Ive been progressing slowly as I have many projects on the go.
This is also coming from someone who doesnt yet have an nx1. Doing the proof of concept and running the fw in a vm to emulate the possible bricking before things are bought.
I am also tracking similarities to the nx500 to see what things are possible in that camera. Nice b camera which should be able to compete with a shortening of its life but at the cost 10x performance is worth the lifespan limit imo.
 
 

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.

For anyone who has not seen the effect for themselves - doubling the bit-rate will blow you away. 

The Panasonic GH2 had even more issues with the image quality than the NX1 does, and with the 150mbps hack the difference is HUGE.
EVERYTHING is better and all the problems of mush in the image and macro-blocking and colors breaking up all just vanished.

Really the only reason I don't use my GH2's as 'A' cameras is because their older design has less dynamic range...maybe 9-stops. 9.5 if your exposure is absolutely perfect.

If we were to double the bit-rate on the NX1 even the Noise Reduction and Sharpening would be FAR less of a problem because they would both be working with so much more image data.

I agree with pretty much all of this especially turning off the NR. But then I just think... I got this camera for $2,200 CAD with the 16-50S lens almost a year ago. Sure when compared to a $3,000 USD body only FF camera doesn't win but it still competes quite well.
I think my point is we should not nit pick the IQ of the NX1 too much but I am definitely all for turning off that annoying NR.
 
With regards to bit rate does it make sense for samsung to handicap the bit rate in the NX1? I mean the NR makes sense because they want to give us the best picture straight from the card witch doesn't necessarily give you the best picture possible but if the bit rate is adjustable i would think samsung  did some testing to determine the optimal bit rate.
For that reason I am trying to focus on encouraging the addition of "new" features that samsung never developed and/or implemented or removing features like NR or time limit that were implemented for various reasons none of witch include any of our semi professional needs.

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... 

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... 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Excellent work there, I was going to have a look myself if it was any close to Linux coding. Still waiting for that SDK tool from Samsung. 

Excellent work there, I was going to have a look myself if it was any close to Linux coding. Still waiting for that SDK tool from Samsung. 

Hi,
A nice breakthrough in hacking NX500 (and possibly NX1 - could someone try and report back?).
So, TLDR version first: I'm able to run a shell script off the SD card without hacking the firmware (and some other stuff). This is just a very modest start, now we need to do everything else. That said, this is a useful start as we can now play around without bricking cameras.
That was the moderately good news, the moderately bad news is that I'm absolutely swamped by work related stuff next few weeks.
Now for longer version:
First a small "hack": If you want to take a screenshot of your camera screen put a file named save_screen_enable.txt in the SD card root and every time you press EV+OK a file named OSD####.jpg will be saved to SD card root. save_screen_enable.txt will contain the integer of next image id (as bytes, not text).
Another small "hack": If you want to see how all the popups and notices look in all the languages (for any reson) put a file named qa.txt in the root of the SD card. When you power the camera on you will see a popup menu that enables you to access all the popups, etc, in camera (press up and down to change them, left and right to change the language). It's meant for quality assurance staff, but here it is.
If you like scrolling through the popups - that's fine. Even better is that the camera app crashes on popup 188 (of 189, go figure) and produces a lot of detailed logs on the SD card. These logs are named timestamp_{log,a7_log,a9_crash,a9_dlog,a9_dmesg}.info
If you take your sweet time analyzing these logs you will find that NX500 does not boot all that often - it hibernates and then wakes up when you power the camera on - cute - that's how it starts up in one second
Also, some RAM information: Total RAM is 512MB, reserved (buffer?) is 380MB. It fits nicely with known buffer limitations. It also means it's very very difficult to extend it to anything larger (maybe by eliminating allshare app or similar but that would give us a frame or two in RAW at best - hardly worth it).
How to run a shell script file:
1. Put file named "info.tg" on the SD card root with contents "nx_cs.adj" and a newline
2. Put file named "nx_cs.adj" (can use something else really) on the SD card root and put "shell script /mnt/mmc/test.sh" and a newline in it
3. Put file named "test.sh" (or whatever you put up there) on SD card root and put whatever bash shell commands you want to in it. Word of caution - it's easy to make a mistake - start small and work carefully
4. Put SD card in camera
5. Camera to AUTO mode (IIRC it works in any mode but whatever, it's in AUTO in the Service Manual)
6. Power on the camera and wait a bit (or a lot, it seems it's quite lazy with closing files and syncing, might do it for it by calling "sync" at the end)
7. Power the camera off (and wait for blinking light to stop blinking if it's blinking)
For example, if you put following in test.sh
st > /mnt/mmc/test
This is what you get on the output:
usage: st [command] [param]
Supported bult-in commands
    help        readl        writel        dump    
    gpio        hdmi        log        lcd    
    cap        pmu        clk        thread    
    key        firmware    util        app    
    leak        devman        stlcd        bat    
    rtc        tbm        micom        misc    
    oic        dvfs        adc    
I put a "ls -laR / > /mnt/mmc/test" and it did list the whole filesystem including /proc /sys /dev etc. And /etc tar also works.
I can see for example that every time process id 247 is given to /usr/apps/com.samsung.di-camera-app/bin/di-camera-app and it runs under root (almost everything does), dfmsd (that's the deamon that interprets commands in nx_cs.adj file that are read and sent by dfmstool - I will have to see what else I can do with it), /usr/apps/com.samsung.ap-setting-app/bin/ap-setting-app running with some access keys or hashed caller PIDs, etc, the works.
Only two modules are loaded (exfat_fs and exfat_core) but I guess we could compile anything we need and enable it in the future (usb audio anybody?).
That's it for now (and some time).
Oh, yeah, the touch screen does not work with info.tg or info.tgw present on the SD card.
Cheers,
Otto

Thanks, I just requested it as well.
The one you're pointing to is pretty locked down. The important stuff comes in binary format not source code.

You can request the SDK here http://nxcameraportal.cloudapp.net/SDK/UserInfo or through the i-Launcher application, I requested a copy now I just have to wait, apparently the SDK gives you control over the camera completely for development of software.
I have tried finding external download links for it, but no imbecile has bothered sharing it apparently. Talk about being greedy, I seen loads of people with the SDK tool but no one gives download link and their posts are usually months old.

Basically what you want is the Samsung NX1 SDK, right? And that exists including a 91 page PDF document for it.