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Magic Lantern Is Back

magiclantern.fm

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Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#121

Post by pavel_lishin »

gattr wrote: post #119
pavel_lishin wrote: post #103

I should give this a shot. I used to use CHDK so I could use my old crappy Canon into something that would take good time-lapse videos by snapping a photo every X seconds; I miss doing that, though now it's harder because I live in the 'burbs, and there's no particularly spots for that nearby, and anywhere that is a good spot likely doesn't have a power outlet for me to use. I wonder how long I could power my camera…

I used to do it as well with a cheap second-hand IXUS 230 HS. It could run (at least) 48 h off a 7.2 Ah 12 V AGM battery, snapping a photo every 3 s (I used a fake-battery power adapter and a small DC-DC converter.)

> I used a fake-battery power adapter and a small DC-DC converter.

Same here. I used to live in a fairly tall building in Manhattan, so found my way to the roof, found an outlet, and would set it up to do timelapses of sunsets over the Hudson.

The camera lens was pretty dirty, so they weren't great, but I enjoyed them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVpOgP-8c9A

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#122

Post by names_r_hard »

grep_name wrote: post #117
names_r_hard wrote: post #29

Thanks to all who are sharing their appreciation for this niche but cool project. I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions. Got a Canon DSLR or mirrorless and like a bit of software reverse engineering? Consider joining in; it's quite an approachable hardware target. No code obfuscation, just classic reversing. You can pick up a well supported cam for a little less than $100. Cams range from ARMv5te up to AA…

Wow, newly supported models is super exciting to see! I have a 5d mk iii which I got specifically to play around with ML. I haven't done much videography in my life, but do plan to get some b-roll at the very least with my mk iii or maybe record some friends live events sometime. > I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions. Well, you asked for it! One question I've always wondered about the project is: what i…

5D3 is perhaps the best currently supported ML cam for video. It's very capable - good choice. Using both CF and SD cards simultaneously, it can record at about 145MB/s, so you can get very high quality footage.

Re what we can support - it's a reverse engineering project, we can support anything with enough time ;) The very newest cams have software changes that make enabling ML slightly harder for normal users, but don't make much difference from a developer perspective. I don't see any signs of Canon trying to lock out reverse engineers. Gaining access and doing a basic, ML GUI but no features port, is not hard when you have experience.

What we choose to support: I work on the cams that I have. And the cams that I have are whatever I find for cheap, so it's pretty random. Other devs have whatever priorities they have :)

The first cam I ported to was 200D, unsupported at the time. This took me a few months to get ML GUI working (with no features enabled), and I had significant help. Now I can get a new cam to that standard in a few days in most cases. All the cams are fairly similar for the core OS. It's the peripherals that change the most as hardware improves, so this takes the most time. And the newer the camera, the more the hw and sw has diverged from the best supported cams.

The cheapest way for you to get started is to use your 5D3 - which you can do in our fork of qemu. You can dump the roms (using software, no disassembly required), then emulate a full Canon and ML GUI, which can run your custom ML changes. There are limitations, mostly around emulation of peripherals. It's still very useful if you want to improve / customise the UI.

https://github.com/reticulatedpines/qemu-eos/tree/qemu-eos-v...

Re docs - they're not in a great shape. It's scattered over a few different wikis, a forum, and commit messages in multiple repos. Quick discussion happens on Discord. We're very responsive there, it's the best place for dev questions. The forum is the best single source for reference knowledge. From a developer perspective, I have made some efforts on a Dev Guide, but it's far from complete, e.g.:

https://github.com/reticulatedpines/magiclantern_simplified/...

If you want physical hardware to play with (it is more fun after all), you might be able to find a 650d or 700d for about $100. Anything that's Digic 5 green here is a capable target:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_EOS_digital_cam...

Digic 4 stuff is also easy to support, and will be cheaper, but it's less capable and will be showing its age generally - depends if that bothers you.

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#123

Post by fooker »

names_r_hard wrote: post #29

Thanks to all who are sharing their appreciation for this niche but cool project. I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions. Got a Canon DSLR or mirrorless and like a bit of software reverse engineering? Consider joining in; it's quite an approachable hardware target. No code obfuscation, just classic reversing. You can pick up a well supported cam for a little less than $100. Cams range from ARMv5te up to AA…

I recently obtained an astro converted 6D. Have played around with CHDK a long time ago as a teenager but never magic lantern.

I am a compiler dev with decent low level skills, anything in particular I should look at that would be good for the project as well as my ‘new’ 6D? (No experience with video unfortunately)

I have a newer R62 as well, but would rather not try anything with it yet.

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#124

Post by pixelmonkey »

chownie wrote: post #69
names_r_hard wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with some of what you're saying; some of the well known risks of working in C are because it's a small standard. But much of the undefined behaviour was deliberately made that way to support the hardware of the time - it's hard to be cross-platform on different architectures as a low-level language. C genuinely is easy to pick up. It is harder to master. And you're right, for many domains, there are better op…

> C genuinely is easy to pick up. I feel like this is a bit of an https://xkcd.com/2501/ situation. C is considered easy to pick up for the average user posting HN comments because we have the benefit of years -- the average comp sci student, who has been exposed to Javascript and Python, who might not know what "pass by reference" even means... I'm not sure they're going to be considering C easy.

C is taught as the introduction to programming in CS50x, Harvard's wildly popular MOOC for teaching programming to first-year college students and lifelong learners via the internet. Using the clang toolchain gives you much better error messages than old versions of gcc used to give. And I bet AI/LLM/copilot tools are pretty good at C given how much F/OSS is written in C.

Just to provide another data point here... that C is a little easier to pick up, today, than it was in the 1990s or 2000s, when all you had was the K&R C book and a Linux shell. I regularly recommend CS50x to newcomers to programming via a guide I wrote up as a GitHub gist. I took the CS50x course myself in 2020 (just to refresh my own memory of C after years of not using it that much), and it is very high quality.

See this comment for more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690760

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#125

Post by names_r_hard »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #113
names_r_hard wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, good, just making sure :) Fun to hear that at least some photo gear places are aware of ML! I have done a stint in QA, as well as highly aggressive security testing against a big C codebase, so I too care a lot about quality. And you can do it in C, you just have to put in the effort. I'd like to get Valgrind or ASAN working with our code, but that's quite a big task on an RTOS. It would be more practical in Qe…

Good point, and really just semantics. I guess you could say native mobile apps are “firmware,” using my criteria. But I put as much effort into my mobile apps, as I did, into my firmware projects (it’s been decades since I wrote firmware, BTW. The landscape is quite different, these days -This is my first ever shipped engineering project[0]. Back then, we could still use an ICE to debug our software). It just taught…

Yes, it gets a bit blurry, especially given how fast solid-state storage is these days.

I think IoT has seen a resurgence in firmware devs... but regrettably not so much in quality. Too cheap to be worth it, I suppose. I can imagine a microwave could be quite a concerning product to design - there's some fairly obvious risks there!

Certainly, whatever you class ML as, we could damage the hardware. The shutter in particular is quite vulnerable, and Canon has made an unusual design choice that it flashes an important rom with settings at every power off. Leaving these settings in an inconsistent state can prevent the cam from booting. We do try to think hard about contingencies, and program defensively. At least for anything we release. I've done some very stupid tests on my own cams, and only needed to recover with UART access once ;)

I haven't use ICE, but I have used SoftICE. Oh, and we had a breakthrough on locating JTAG pinouts very recently, so we might end up being able to do similar.

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#126

Post by pixelmonkey »

names_r_hard wrote: post #29

Thanks to all who are sharing their appreciation for this niche but cool project. I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions. Got a Canon DSLR or mirrorless and like a bit of software reverse engineering? Consider joining in; it's quite an approachable hardware target. No code obfuscation, just classic reversing. You can pick up a well supported cam for a little less than $100. Cams range from ARMv5te up to AA…

I just want to say "thank you." I run Magic Lantern on my Canon 5D Mark III (5d3) and it is such awesome software.

I am a hobbyist nature photographer and it helped me capture some incredible moments. Though I have a Canon R7, the Canon 5d3 is my favorite camera because I prefer the feel of DSLR optical viewfinders when viewing wildlife subjects, and I prefer certain Canon EF lenses.

More here:

https://amontalenti.com/photos

When I hang out with programmer friends and demo Magic Lantern to them, they are always blown away.

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#127

Post by WalterSchulz »

MDGeist wrote: post #120

It has been many moons since I used Magic Lantern. Has anamorphic desqueeze ever been a feature or could it be in the future? That's one missing feature that bums me out about shooting videos on Canon.

Support for anamorphic lense ML has for ages: 5:4 (1.25); 4:3 (1.33); 7:5 (1.4); 3:2 (1.5); 5:3 (1.66); 9:5 (1.8); 2:1 (2)

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#128

Post by larodi »

names_r_hard wrote: post #66
larodi wrote: post #60

If I’m to get a secondhand camera to run MM which would your recommend? 200D or 600D?

I wouldn't recommend the 600D if you want to do video. For stills it's perfectly acceptable. Auto-focus will feel slow compared to a modern cam. If you're going for an old / budget cam, try and reach to the 650D or 700D, those are a newer generation of hardware. 200D is much newer, but less well supported by ML. I own this cam and am actively working on improving it. 200D has DPAF, which means considerably improved a…

I'm interested in using all kinds of devices for streaming live video from live (think music) events via OBS with minimal effort. Current setup is with a device (just an old iPhone can do) which provides WiFi connectivity, then another (or the same device) runs DroidCAM which them streams into a nearby laptop with OBS (typically capturing the audio needed) and this is then sent to wherever we decide (twitch, RSTP, etc). We've tried this setup with as many as three droidcam phones, and it is just fine on... a legacy MacBook Pro with Intel + 1500MB Iris card.

So ideally I'd imagine getting a second-hand 600D or 200D and having a similar setup. We did have a setup (previously) where a GoPro or mini-HDMI campera is captured and then processed by a RBPi 2/3/4, but this seems an overkill compared to the DroidCAM Setup.

And, of course, the optics on the 600D/200D are expected to be much more correct than those on an iPhone or similar phone/mobile device.

Thanks for your kind attention.

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#129

Post by arnaudsm »

I absolutely love Magic Lantern, and I wish similar initiatives existed on Sony and Nikon! I was forced to upgrade my Sony camera purely because of software limitations.

Firmwares should be open-source by law. Especially when products are discontinued.

Re: Magic Lantern Is Back

#130

Post by WalterSchulz »

larodi wrote: post #128
names_r_hard wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't recommend the 600D if you want to do video. For stills it's perfectly acceptable. Auto-focus will feel slow compared to a modern cam. If you're going for an old / budget cam, try and reach to the 650D or 700D, those are a newer generation of hardware. 200D is much newer, but less well supported by ML. I own this cam and am actively working on improving it. 200D has DPAF, which means considerably improved a…

I'm interested in using all kinds of devices for streaming live video from live (think music) events via OBS with minimal effort. Current setup is with a device (just an old iPhone can do) which provides WiFi connectivity, then another (or the same device) runs DroidCAM which them streams into a nearby laptop with OBS (typically capturing the audio needed) and this is then sent to wherever we decide (twitch, RSTP, et…

With 600D you are stuck to 1620x912 in video mode embedded in 1080i59.94 8-bit. Black borders around and you have to crop and - maybe - scale up. 200D HDMI stream with ML is clean with MF but AF will still draw a focus rectangle. But at least true FHD via HDMI.

AF with 600D in liveview: Phase detection only. Focus hunting galore. 200D comes with usable DPAF.

I prefer 250D for streaming. Dual display support, no 30 minute limit for HDMI out (but cam display will go dark until some button action).

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