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Ubuntu Tip Connecting To GoPro Hero4 Silver via WiFi

Any body who owns a GoPro camera will likely know you can connect to it using the GoPro app on your tablet. You will also know that GoPro has some handy video editing software that they will give you for free. All you have to do to get it is head over to their website and download it. Unless youre a Linux user. Its Mac and Windows only.

The tablet app is Android compatible. However it would not let me download files to an SD card. It seems to want to use the tablets own internal storage. And since the videos are quite large. This can be problematic.

Now youd think the easy way around this would be connecting the camera to a desktop PC and using the USB port or simply removing the SD card. Neither of these options were working out for me. USB connectivity was spotty and irritating. Sometimes the camera would show me the files. And then nothing would happen when I tried to copy them or my PC would freeze.

Im not really sure what the issue is. But GoPro Hero4 and USB transfers are just not an option on my PC.

I had similar issues with the 64GB SD card. Which actually wasnt even recognised by Ubuntu at all. Its likely my little USB adapter just cant handle it. Whatever the problem was. Ubuntu just didnt see the card at all and so couldnt mount it.

I thought I had made a horrific error in buying GoPros. I use them while commuting to work on my bicycle. So I started looking for a solution. And found a link which described how to stream live video from a GoPro using VLC. The tutorial was for the Mac. But all it needed was a WiFi connection to the GoPro camera, a web browser and VLC. Nothing Mac specific then.

So I figured if I can stream live video. Maybe I can transfer pre-recorded videos. And I was right.

Step 1: Enable the WiFi on your GoPro using the GoPro app option and NOT the RC.

Step 2: Connect to the GoPros WiFi network as you would with any other network. It will be named whatever you named the camera when you connected to the Android app. If you havent done this yet. Do it now.

Step 3: Open your web browser and go to 10.5.5.9:8080 and this will take you to the GoPros internal web page. From here there are a number of options. Click the option that says "videos". The click "DCIM" and finally "100GOPRO".



Step 4: Click on the video file you want to download as you normally would with any other file.

And thats all there is to it.

EDIT - 07/07/2015: Some folk might prefer this method.

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Ubuntu Tip GoPro Hero 4 gphoto2 USB

There are a couple of methods in Ubuntu to get your content off of a GoPro. We can connect to the GoPro over WiFi. We can download content directly from the SD cards and we can download content from the camera via USB. Just drag and drop.

Each method has is pros and cons. WiFi can drop out and its painfully slow for 4GB HD video files. Constantly removing and inserting SD cards does them no favours. And dragging and dropping is hard to automate with a script.

Finding the GoPro on the command line takes effort. I personally couldnt do it. Yet Nautilus finds the camera without any problem. And if you look at the actual address of the camera in Nautilus (ctrl+l). Things get a bit stranger still. Its not a normal directory listing. Instead we get something weird , "gphoto2://[usb:003,003]/". Which the usual command line tools wont touch.

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Ubuntu Tip GoPro and exFAT

Previously I have described how Ubuntu users can connect to their GoPro cameras over a WiFi network. I also noted that Ubuntu didnt seem to like the 64GB SD cards. Well it seems they are formatted to the exFAT file system. Which means we can fix this problem with one simple command.

All we need to do is open a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+t and install a few packages with the following command. Enter your password when prompted.

Youre Ubuntu PC should now be able to read exFAT formatted SD cards. If it cant read them right away. Try rebooting.

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