Offloading GoPro Footage the Easy Way!

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- 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. -

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- 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, 10.5.5.9, 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 - wget. 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: -

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-sh wget --recursive --accept "*.MP4" http://10.5.5.9:8080/
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- This tells wget 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. -

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Some things I would like to change/add:

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- Download all image files as well; should be easy, just another - --accept -
Initiate parallel downloads
- Clean up the directory afterwards so I just have one level of depth -

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- 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. -