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<h1>Offloading GoPro Footage the Easy Way!</h1>
<p>
Transferring files off of most cameras to a Linux computer isn't all
that difficult. The exception is my GoPro Hero 4 Black. For 4th of July
week I took a bunch of video with the GoPro, approximately 20 MP4 files,
about 3GB each. The annoying thing about the GoPro's USB interface is
you need additional software to download everything through the cable.
The camera doesn't just show up as a USB filesystem that you can mount.
The GoPro does have a micro-SD card but I was away from home and didn't
have any dongles or adapters. Both of these solutions also mean taking
the camera out of its waterproof case and off of its mount. So here's
what I did.
</p>
<p>
GoPro cameras, after the Hero 3, can open up an ad-hoc wireless network
that lets you browse the GoPro's onboard files through an HTTP server.
This means you can open your browser and scroll through the files on the
camera at an intranet address, <code>10.5.5.9</code>, and download them
one by one by clicking every link on every page. If you have a lot of
footage on there it kinda sucks. So, I opened up the manual for
<code>wget</code>. I'm sure you could get really fancy with some of the
options but the only thing I cared about was downloading every single
MP4 video off of the camera, automatically. I did not want to download
any of the small video formats or actual HTML files. Here's what I used:
</p>
<pre>
<code>
sh wget --recursive --accept "*.MP4" http://10.5.5.9:8080/
</code>
</pre>
<p>
This tells <code>wget</code> to download all of the files at the GoPro's
address recursively and skips any that don't have the MP4 extension. Now
I've got a directory tree with all of my videos in it. And the best part
is I didn't have to install the dinky GoPro app on my laptop. Hopefully
this helps if you're looking for an easy way to migrate lots of footage
without manually clicking through the web interface or installing
additional software. The only downside is if you're moving a whole lot
of footage, it's not nearly as quick as just moving files off the SD
card. So I'd shoot for using the adapter to read off the card first and
only use this if that's not an option, such as when the camera is
mounted and you don't want to move it.
</p>
<p>Some things I would like to change/add:</p>
<ul>
<li>
Download all image files as well; should be easy, just another
<code>--accept</code>
</li>
<li>Initiate parallel downloads</li>
<li>
Clean up the directory afterwards so I just have one level of depth
</li>
</ul>
<p>
I could probably write a quick and dirty shell script to do all of this
for me but I use the camera so infrequently that it's probably not even
worth it.
</p>
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