GH4 GH4 firmware research volunteers required (again)

M

mash_gh4

Active member
i'm quite frustrated how all this panasonic hack development fell asleep over the last two years.

it became a one-man show that led straight into an dead-end street. all the relevant information gathered in the wider community are now concentrated at one place, where nobody gets access and useful information anymore. meritous developers, that changed the way we think about lumix cameras, are currently more bussy censoring critical minds and hindering any further development by other people. so, i think, we have to reiterate all this collective hard-/firmware research again, to found a new base for alternative GH4 firmware hacks.

i don't know, if this forum is the right place to start such an attempt (again)? but here it has it's historical origins...

if you have any relevant knowledge or access to information from earlier panasonic related hacks etc., please participate, share your info and make it useable for a wider developer community again! any useful information is welcome.
 
To give benefit of doubt, Panasonic reacted and has made hacking its firmware extremely difficult if not impossible. My understanding is there is now lots of encryption. Add the cameras becoming quite good, with very complex processors and encoders, and this has made hacking likely to yield small improvements... Al
 
To be perfectly honest, Panasonic has been doing a marvelous job hacking the GH line for us. The GH3 felt like a GH2 with the hacks applied. GH4, compared to the competition, I'm not sure where it's lacking aside from hardware features like ND, larger sensor, or a well-integrated XLR module.

Highest kudos to the folks that helped extend my wee GH2 far beyond its weight class, but I think they can take a rest now and focus on other things.
 
hacks to add:

- 48 frame rate
- HDR video
- aspect ratio guidelines
- 3 color histogram
- audio level db detail
- raw video
- automated rack focusing
- useable LOG profile
 
aljudy said:
Panasonic reacted and has made hacking its firmware extremely difficult if not impossible. My understanding is there is now lots of encryption.
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some people had claimed exactly the same, when only the firmware-header was changed between previous models.
i can not disprove your claim, but i have my doubts. engineers usually prefer simple solutions that work reliable. i don't think, they spend much work on superfluous encryption and hack prevention. it sound's more like the outcome of paranoia and self-aggrandizement in strange hacker circles to me, but you may be right...

aljudy said:
Add the cameras becoming quite good, with very complex processors and encoders, and this has made hacking likely to yield small improvements... Al
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yes -- i agree mostly. but for example to bypass the 30min recording limit of the european mainboard variant, shouldn't be an unsolvable challenge.

in general i'm much more interested in remote camera control and metering solutions, than in codec or image quality related realtime topics.
but at first we have to get any access to the internals at all ;)
 
Lpowell said:
Nikon is the new GH2,...
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yes -- nikonhacker is a very valuable source of information! i often stumbled over this site while searching for camera and communication protocol related information. and i perfectly understand, when people use nikon as an more affordable alternative for video work this days.

in general most relevant camera brands have a more vital developer community at the present time than panasonic. and that's really sad.

Lpowell said:
...but for 4K it's GH4 ;)
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yes -- and 4K is not only a gift for free. it's stessing actual hardware to the limits and we will hardly see usful access to raw data etc. on this devices.

but right now we have to look anyhow for the most primitive first steps of access (again)... :)
 
mash_gh4 said:
yes -- i agree mostly. but for example to bypass the 30min recording limit of the european mainboard variant, shouldn't be an unsolvable challenge.
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YES!!!
I was shooting a concert, the audio was clapped to sync with a Tascam, mid recording I remembered the recording stops after 30min and the sound is gonna be out of sync.
So yeah if a firmware would fix that problem it would be great.
 
If it was so easy, it would have been done already. I think for whatever reason, hacking on the GH series is dead. Why I don't know, but it is dead - c'mon, the GH3 has not been hacked in all these years, and you are dreaming of hacking the GH4? That's crazy. It's over - kaput.
 
I also think a hack would benefit a lot. All the functions are there. But GH4 is limited in some ways. As already mentioned above. I would also like to add, HDMI outputs: audio amplifier (go bellow the -12db), etc.
When you look at ML, for years they have been claiming that the 7D was impossible to hack. Well, look today.

I've got no clue how to hack a camera, but all I'm saying is that the idea to collect as much information on one place is good! And if the project will get a head developer some day who's able to modify anything, I'm happy to fund that!
 
@oldcorpse - +1. I can't see there being any more hacks materialising (even though I donated to the GH3 project over at you know where). You want another feature set, then buy another camera, IMHO
 
mr bill said:
I can't see there being any more hacks materialising (even though I donated to the GH3 project over at you know where). You want another feature set, then buy another camera, IMHO
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no -- i don't want to buy a new camere system every year again. ;) i even don't want to waste to much effords on technical toying and utterly unrealistic dreams. it's much more important to have a working camere in your hands that is quite sufficent in most situations.

lots have changed over the last years, no hacker could imagine befor. e.g. wlan remote contol allows us to realize custom control in very simple ways etc.

but it's a pain in the ass, that we don't see any productive exchange of information and continouing efforts in GH-line development outside of panasonic anymore.

do you have any good argument, what makes the GH3 and GH4 so much different to it's predecessors, that we should not be able to modify them slightly to our needs?

pansononic cameras use a lot of very uncommon in-house components and technology. that makes it very hard for independend engineers to analyze and understand their products. but like everyone else they are reusing lots of conventions in the succession of models. so the whole lumix series can be seen as a quite continous progress. vitaly was also using a lot of common knowledge about much older products, to get more insight into the GH1 and GH2. and that's exactly what are missing now. most of this findings are not anymore available to anybody else to go on with further development.

yes -- it may be possible, that some important changes in processor architecture / instruction set etc. happend between the GH2 and GH3 -- i honestly don't know. but i'm shure ther are lots of continuity to find in this actual models as well. i wouldn't expect, they changed the usb debugging and adjust mechanisms from ground up etc.

so -- what do we have right now? what do we know really about this changes in the more actual lumix cameras?
do we have any substitute to the old development tools vitaly found once, to handle the bytecode of this actual platforms?

well -- we are just at the beginning again.

finaly i want to emphasize the fact, that alternative development efforts should not be seen only as a stupid fight beween heroic men. we are all using more or less common knowledege and the same development tools -- like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. so i would not even see the producing companies and their employees in a strict opposite role. they just have to spend their focus on quite different goals. but i would not expect, that sombody really cares about a few crazzy people, that try to fight against minor hitchs. i think even those technicians, that spent so much endeavour to design a camera as good as they could, don't feel much sympathy on wastful crippling 30min record time etc.
 
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The "wasteful crippling" 30 minute limit is solely to appease European tax laws that classify any camera recording video for more than 29:59 as a video camera, which are taxed at a much higher rate than stills cameras. This is the only reason any modern camera system has the semi-arbitrary 29:59 limit (early DSLRs have shorter limits because they didn't span 4GB clips in the antiquated FAT32 file system SD cards use). North American market GH4's have no record time limitation.

Skirting close to the "no politics" dictate of the board, Europeans could release the record time limit on all future hybrid cameras without hacking anything by demanding a change in those laws.
 
mash_gh4 said:
i'm quite frustrated how all this panasonic hack development fell asleep over the last two years.

it became a one-man show that led straight into an dead-end street. .
Click to expand...

well... away you go - let's see you start some development on hacking the GH3/4 - or are you simply whining in the hope someone else will do it. Do you have a GH4? great, all you have to do is pul it apart and work out exactly what hardware and consequently what software/firmware has been used. a couple of afternoons spent reverse engineering the camera and you're good to go.

There has been a huge amount of work put in by a number of people over the years but it was always a one man show because the number of people with the brains, time & passion to complete the task was in short supply and still is - it's the people who whinge & want impossible improvements out of the camera that are in plentiful supply
 
aljudy said:
To give benefit of doubt, Panasonic reacted and has made hacking its firmware extremely difficult if not impossible. My understanding is there is now lots of encryption. Add the cameras becoming quite good, with very complex processors and encoders, and this has made hacking likely to yield small improvements... Al
Click to expand...

+1

Once Panasonic releases GH4 firmware with VLog recording, I will be a completely satisfied customer. ( I'm close right now, but Vlog is all that's missing for me )
 
tired said:
...all you have to do is pul it apart and work out exactly what hardware and consequently what software/firmware has been used.[/qoute]

i didn't see a free "GH4 service manual" out there in the wild, but it's quite easy to find one for the GH3. so, pull it apart and read out the data in IC9999 (flash-rom), would not be unreasonable difficult. but i think, using the same usb mechanism as the original "adjustment software" to make a backup of it's content, should manage the same. well, this depends a lot on the progress and knowledge some other people have carried togehter in the past. if you have to start from the ground up, without any useful information, studing the hardware may be a promising strategy. but it does not look very efficent, if others have found out most of this fundamental insights already in the past. in this case it looks much more fruitful, to share this knowledge among each other and concentrate on more specific changes in the actual model and unexplored code details.

tired said:
a couple of afternoons spent reverse engineering the camera and you're good to go.
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you know very well, how much time is required for this kind of research. ;)
in most similar cases it didn't work very well, unless a few people shared their knowledge and efforts

tired said:
There has been a huge amount of work put in by a number of people over the years but it was always a one man show because the number of people with the brains, time & passion to complete the task was in short supply and still is - it's the people who whinge & want impossible improvements out of the camera that are in plentiful supply
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yes -- i understand your grief.

but watching this case from an outer point of view, it shows a quite different scenario. most of the useful/accessible information about the internals of this cameras, are not shared by the lead devolpers, but by those people, that gave them little hints on their way. yes -- this may look increadable to you, but that's the way how it looks to somebody just studying the unclosed information out there. most of the importand insights that we would need for any efficent further progress looks utterly closed in a black hole by this kind of uncooperative development model. and that's really sad. i think, it's the root cause for this unsatisfying low outcome of all this panasonic hacks.

TheDingo said:
Once Panasonic releases GH4 firmware with VLog recording, I will be a completely satisfied customer. ( I'm close right now, but Vlog is all that's missing for me )
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why do you really think, panasonic will give us such an update?

yes -- they may be some prototypes of GH5 features still arround, and they able to run on actual GH4 hardware, but i don't expect such a firmware upgrade for the existing product. i also wouldn't expect anything similar features as outcome from isolated hacks. the only insight we can deduce from the believable existence of such features, is this obvious continuity in camera development. there was not so much change between the GH2 and GH3 concerning the venus engine. and the GH4 again has a lot in common with is predecessors, albeit using a much more powerful quad core image processor. therefore it's really importand that also the hackish development is seen as a more steady progess of litte steps building up on each other. achievements like the magic lantern raw recording are not only detached genious hacks but also as the outcome of a long history of shared(!) efforts and knowledge.
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