Offloading GoPro Video 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. +