undecided

3 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

I got an email from Mr April Fools himself...

"As promised, I will send you (download link) the footage of my Proof of Concept on time (01. April 2018) for evaluation. It would be very nice, if you could share your opinion honestly with me - after testing the maleability and behaviour, even when you do heavy grading. Please consider, that I will be not online from 01.04. at about 14:00 European time up to 04.04. in the morning, so I can NOT answer YOUR questions. I will try to write down most settings and as you are a very experienced technician, you will not have any problems with handling, for sure."

Since it is pretty clear what's going on here, Arikhan has been banned from further participation in this forum, because he's a time waster.

Andrew, I thought he meant he'd be offline for months when I first read this post.  Then, I realized he is using european date/time so it's only 3 days. No biggie. I vote to allow him to continue.

1 hour ago, sanveer said:

By 1st April 2022, I will release a hack whereby you will be able to shoot 5k RAW on you Mavic Air. 

 

I am sharing this pic. I don't know what's it's got to do with the 5k hack, but honestly, who cares.

 

lol

57 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

Your kids have disorders? this is a very controversial and complicated issue, when I was a teenager, my disorder was that I was listening too much Joy Division, Smiths and The Sound!

So many feelings
Pent up in here
Left all alone, I'm with
The one I most fear

I'm sick and I'm tired
Of reasoning;
Just want to break out
Shake off this skin

I, I can't
Escape myself

All my problems
Loom larger than life
I can't swallow
Another slice

Seems like my shadow
Mocks every stride
I learn to live with
What's trapped inside?

Believe it, or not, this is still a very popular song to our parties!

Yes, and quite a few of their friends....I think it's all fine. they are kids..

3 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

Too harsh man... you complicate it even more. I do not know the guy but I wouldn't assume anything about anyone though.

I agree, it would be harsh but I cannot for the life of me figure out why he would not want to divulge ANY info. Very peculiar behaviour even for a young person. I've had kids and I know they can act strange at times but quite often that strangeness is usually attributed to one of the popular 'disorders'. Again, no negative connotation intended. It just is what it is.

16 hours ago, Kisaha said:

That is not the point @kidzrevil.

I have posted numerous times about how I do NOT care for any kind of raw, I had a 5DmkII staying idle for years and didn't try it, I couldn't care less for raw in my workflow, and I would never shot a feature film or a short with this camera. Plenty of other and better options around.

I, personally, didn't get what was all the fuzz about, why people had to "push" this individual to his limits, and why it was even a big deal?

He said something, he gave a timeline - on his own, without even anyone asked about it - and that was it. I don't get, why he had to be proven right, or wrong. 

In 4 days, we would be able to know, and not even wasting a second of our lives for posting various things here.

That what I was saying here multiple times, with different ways, and I am seriously more curious, why people had to prove him anything, instead of wait, and continue with their lives for 7 (back then) more days, until the "big" announcement.

As I said, I do not even care for raw, especially if I have to open my cameras and do "stuff" to them, or includes any complicated workflow, so I am not even feeling like I lost an opportunity, I am just curious to know what drove all these people's response.

Excitement? Financial benefit? Jealousy? lust (for data!)? lust (for e-blood)?! 

I am just psyched if this is true. I expect some great footage out of the NX1 with raw especially if it improves on the known issues like ISO noise in video (which we all assumed was due to the noise reduction algos), rolling shutter, etc.

16 minutes ago, mercer said:

This definitely seems interesting but I am a little skeptical. I’m confused because I’m unsure if this is an in camera hack where you’ve figured out how to write motion or cdng files in the NX1 (or an equivalent like MLV) or if this requires something in post to complete the process? If it is internal I can only imagine you may have harnessed the Raw timelapse function or something? I don’t know... interesting either way and I look forward to the results. Any way it would work on an NX500?

What if Samsung already had Raw capability in there but in their infinite wisdom decided to compress to H265 to differentiate itself from competitors and to also allow for smaller SD cards to be used? Don't forget, at the time of designing the NX1 SD card capacity barely reached 32GB and speeds were much lower than today. RAW probably requires really fast cards. Theoretically RAW is what should coming out 1st and then compressed so having RAW is probably in there already.

38 minutes ago, Arikhan said:

Yes. At the moment I work much with 24fps, as after some changes, I got unregular frame skipping when doing 25p. 

What are the implications of raw shooting in the nx1? Are you getting full readout? Is rolling shutter effect lessened? Video ISO noise? Is it still an issue over 3200?

Thx

p.s. Did this involve poking values into registers/memory locations or were you able to recompile the firmware?

Did you have to pay insane s&h? It was like $30 for the $57 cage.....They shipped from Taiwan.

Thought I'd drop this

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-introduces-the-evo-plus-256gb-microsd-card-with-the-highest-capacity-in-its-class

right here

Can we make a sticky with links to the latest versions of all the hacks, etc? Maybe edit the 1st post in the thread and add all the links to latest there.

Thx

Internal would be great.....Thx

If I may chime in here. The ideal interface for me would be to drop some files in the sd with names like 4KMax.config, 1080pMax.config for example. The GUI should just get all the file names that end in .config and show them as options. I pick one and the settings from within that .config file are applied. This way, the system could be made very flexible and extensible and people can share settings. The file should probably be in a human-readable format like json.

I am very interested in bumping up the HEVC bitrate to whatever maximum is allowed. I think that will improve the image quality a lot. My PCs have high end GPUs so I am not worried about decoding. I am prepared to contribute $$$ to the effort as well.

21 hours ago, SMGJohn said:

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.

Thanks, I just requested it as well.

15 hours ago, giannis_ch said:

Is the SDK you are looking for here https://opensource.samsung.com/reception/receptionSub.do?method=sub&sub=T&menu_item=photography&classification1=digital cameras ?

The one you're pointing to is pretty locked down. The important stuff comes in binary format not source code.

7 hours ago, MountneerMan said:

 

I was under the same impression.

@SMGJohn et al, where can I download the SKD and 91 page PDF? I would be interested in giving it a look over. USB 3.0 has a transfer rate of 5Gb/sec witch is more than enough for a 4K RAW stream. I am imagining being able to plug in a laptop(with an SSD) via USB and using it like an external recorder except you would have pretty much complete control of the camera(except zoom and aperture depending on the lens) as well.

Does any one think this would even be possible? I am not a CS expect.

 

Did you read the dpreview posts I linked yesterday above? otto K said he thinks its possible to run scripts from the SD Card witch would allow for the use of debuggers.

Also because the NX1/NX500 are Tizen based it sounds like it could be quite easy(relatively speaking) to create an emulator https://developer.tizen.org/development/tools/common-tools/emulator . Again I am far from a CS expect and I am way out of my depth and really have no idea. Anyone who knows better please correct me.

Very interesting, I wonder if the firmware can execute on this VM

15 hours ago, Syme said:

I don't think I currently have the experience or time to successfully modify the NX1/NX500 firmware. I don't even have one of those cameras. However it would be a shame to let the interest in this die, so I guess I'll post some of my notes/thoughts about the firmware in hopes that it might help keep the ball rolling.

Note: if you aren't into technical minutiae, the only interesting part of this wall of text is the bulleted list at the end detailing what is and is not possible in my opinion.

Here are the files listed in the header of nx1.bin (version 1.4.0):

version.info:    offset=0x0          size=0x3F   (same as found in /etc/version.info)
linux image:    offset=0x0130       size=0x00624748
idk:                   offset=0x624878     size=0xD8E9
linux image:    offset=0x632161     size=0x3192E8
linux image:    offset=0x94B449     size=0x638518
idk:            offset=0xF83961     size=0x01FF10
idk:            offset=0xFA3871     size=0xB35140
rootfs:         offset=0x1AD89B1    size=0x117A89FF     (lzo compressed ext4 filesystem image)
opt:            offset=0x132813B0   size=0x58E91C   (lzo compressed ext4 filesystem image)
pcachelist:     offset=0x1380FCCC   size=0x7000 (PAGECACHELIST, preceded by a header, I think)
idk:            offset=0x13816CCC   size=0x35BCC44  (lzo compressed. header indicates swap image?)

Anyone with the skills to reverse engineer a camera could figure this out pretty easily, but it was fairly tedious so maybe this will save someone 20 minutes of poking around in a hex editor. If anyone knows what's up with the files I've labeled "idk," I would love to hear about it.

The checksum algorithm is fortunately unchanged from the NX300 as far as I can tell.

As documented at sites.google.com/site/nxcryptophotography/diy-firmware
"width=32 poly=0x04c11db7 init=0xffffffff refin=true refout=true xorout=0x00000000 check=0x340bc6d9 name="JAMCRC""
"jacksum -x -a crc:32,04c11db7,ffffffff,true,true,00000000 [file]"

The main camera app binary is (I'm pretty sure) located at /usr/apps/com.samsung.di-camera-app/bin/di-camera-app in the rootfs. It seems to access the hardware through a relatively high-level API with the /usr/lib/libmm* libraries. libmmf-camcorder.so is particularly interesting. The function I've focused my attention on is mmf_camcorder_set_attributes(), which comes from libffm-camcorder and is used repeatedly in di-camera-app. It conveniently (and strangely IMO) takes strings as identifiers for the attributes that are apparently being set (why not just an enum? I suppose I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth...). Some of those attributes include "target-time-limit," "audio-encoder-bitrate," and "video-encoder-bitrate." The guy who successfully removed the recording time limit on the NX300 did it by modifying the instructions that set the variable being passed along with "targe-time-limit." I found the control flow instructions he mentioned in that thread, so it should't be hard to get rid of the time limit on the NX1, provided the camera accepts the modified firmware. The NX500 is probably similar. The "video-encoder-bitrate" attribute also looks promising, though it would take some more advanced reverse engineering to figure out where the values are being set.

So from what I've seen and read, here is what I think is and is not possible to modify on the NX1 and NX500:

• Remove time limit: Highly likely. Seems to be the same as the NX300. Pretty easy too, if there aren't any new security measures in place.
• Increased bitrate: Possible. Needs some real reverse engineering to find where the rates are set for each resolution and quality.
• Noise reduction and sharpening: Possible. Haven't seen anything that looks like it's controlling these, but if setting the bitrate works, this should be possible too. FWIW I think that increasing the bitrate would help with the noise reduction issues. H.265 tends to smooth things out a lot to achieve low bitrates.
• Re-enable 2.5k on NX500: Plausible but difficult. It depends on whether they just removed it from di-camera-app, or if they removed it from the underlying libraries as well. Either way it would likely require actually adding control flow to the binary, which opens a whole new can of worms. Beyond my current ability, for sure.
• Focus peaking for NX500 4k: Maybe? I have no idea, really. There might be a good reason they didn't include it, there might not.
• 4k crop on NX1: Plausible but even more difficult. We know the hardware can do it, but it was probably never implemented on the NX1, even in pre-production.
• Gamma profile on NX500: Plausible. Similar to porting the NX500's 4k crop to the NX1, I think.
• 6k 24fps H.265: Highly unlikely. The H.265 encoder would have to support frame sizes larger than DCI 4k and be able to handle twice the pixel rate (clock speed) of 4k. Furthermore it would require implementing a brand-new video mode at a very low level. I can't say for sure it's categorically impossible, but don't get your hopes up.
• 10bit H.265: Nope. The H.265 standard does indeed allow for 10bit encoding, but I highly doubt Samsung would include the significantly larger (wider busses, more complex encoding) hardware necessary to do it. It would be a miracle if Samsung had really decided to go to all that effort and not use it.
• 6k or full sensor 4k at more than 30fps or 1080p at (significantly) more than 120fps: Impossible. The image sensor simply isn't fast enough. If you hope for this you will just be disappointed!
• RAW Video: Not really. It might be theoretically possible to dump the live-view feed as in Magic Lantern. Who knows how fast the SD card interface is, though. Certainly no more than 1080p. I can imagine tricking the GPU into packing 12bit 4k RAW into 1080p 444 HDMI like Apertus, but consider that a pipe dream. Don't get your hopes up.

Anyway, that was longer than I expected, but I enjoyed poking around in the firmware, so I don't regret it even if it comes to nothing. It's a shame Samsung appears to be dropping the NX line; they are cool little cameras.

p.s. If you know anything I've said is wrong, please correct me; I'm learning this as I go along.

One way to see what is going on would be to be able to have a development kit. Like an emulator for the camera firmware to run on. Not sure if such a beast ever existed

21 hours ago, Marco Tecno said:

undecided, if real raw, then it can only be 6.5k (or 4k if cropped, not downscaled). 4k downscaled involves processing, hence can't be raw...

I meant 4K cropped, that should require no processing.

13 hours ago, Marco Tecno said:

To verify to bitrate thing one should compare newer fw with older ones, since they increased the max value.

Theoretically possible but there may be tons of things changed between revisions. Did the really bump up the max bitrate in 1.4? I thought it's been the same since the initial release. Also, if the firmware is not signed, then the binary could theoretically be modified with a hex editor.

16 minutes ago, Marco Tecno said:

Referring to nx1, each raw file (28mp) is about 40MB. So 30fps would translate into 1.2GB/sec. So even if the sensor could be able to stream at that rate, no IO device could record it (possibly those new pci-e ssd devices, but you'd need 1TB for few minutes of video...).

It's 35MB for 28MP and that equates to 6.5K video. 2/3 of that would be 4k which would make the bandwidth about 23.3MB. and let's do 25 fps, comes out to 582MB. Still too much.

1 hour ago, Marco Tecno said:

I'm quite sure that if nx1 could output in 4:4:4 10/12bit, it would sell so many units that samsung could even think about starting again the production :-P 

It's all about the codec parameters. They chose file size over detail. They could have made it so that the user could choose.

Early update, I scoured the source archive looking for any hints of where the HEVC bitrate may be defined. I did not see anything. I did not see any evidence of the camera UI in there either. There are a few binary folders and that means that some parts are just delivered compiled already and not in source code which means they will be hard, if not impossible to modify.

5 hours ago, M Carter said:

Indeed, this is all just wishful thinking without a developer that can unravel the pipeline and (probably a good idea) someone with experience in compression and image pipelines. It's all pretty meaningless until a software engineer gets ID'd. 

If we have the full source code everything is doable as long as the hardware can handle it. I can't go into much detail on a web post but basically we can try changing parameters in the source code, then try it. If it doesn't work, try different values. Rinse and repeat until it works. It also depends on how clean the source code is. If it is well documented, the job would be easier.

11 minutes ago, SMGJohn said:

Its come to my attention that no one has posted the Open Source code to the NX1, its a 1.3GB sized .zip file its simply just called NX1.zip, maybe there is something in there to help you guys?

http://opensource.samsung.com/reception/receptionSub.do?method=sub&sub=T&menu_item=photography&classification1=digital%20cameras

Downloading it as we speak but from what I've read, it probably contains only the open source components as Samsung is required buy the licensing to release any changes they made to the open source components.

Quick google search for "Samsung Tizen firmware camera" brought me to this article

http://www.tizenexperts.com/2015/08/samsung-nx1-smart-camera-software-firmware-updated-to-version-v-1-40/ 

There is a post by a gentleman named Nabil who claims to have made the camera record 6K at 240fps in 'debug' mode. We probably need to contact him.

p.s. I am downloading an NX1.zip file from here:
 

http://opensource.samsung.com/reception/receptionSub.do?method=sub&sub=T&menu_item=photography&classification1=digital cameras

Not sure if it's the full OS for the NX1.

26 minutes ago, Marco Tecno said:

in the meanwhile, on dpr:

 

http://***URL removed***/forums/post/57238559

Guys, I am developer but being a developer is different than being a hacker. A developer works with tools that give them the functionality they need. A hacker may have to invent tools for platforms where such tools are not readily available. If we had a publically available SDK and a method to sign and upload the firmware onto the NX1 I am sure I could make changes to it.

1 hour ago, woozie said:

I wonder how many forums members we have with NX1 that are interested. Probably could raise $10k easy with 100-200 supporters.

I'd throw in $50.

n.m. found it on page 6. Those shots look amazing as well. Very impressed with what you're doing with the NX1. I am going to try your settings this weekend.