Eye-fi Video Support using CHDK
September 11th, 2008Yesterday I demoed this to the team at Eye-fi, and they said I was the first person to show them video sent over wireless from a consumer camera (+eye-fi). One of the first implementations of wireless video on consumer cameras, I’m pretty stoked! It means you can use your cheap Canon camera to auto post data to youtube, or some other video sharing service.
If you are not familiar with Eye-fi, it is a special SD card that allows you to upload photos over wireless as you take them. It does not, however, upload videos as you take them. This is because it only looks for valid JPGs. I was able to achieve video uploading by creating a spoofed JPG with CHDK that embedded the video. Eye-fi uploaded the JPG, then the AVI was decoded client side.
To use this, you will need to make sure your camera is supported by CHDK (see table on the homepage). I’ve posted the patch over on the CHDK forums. You can get a built firmware for my camera (SD700IS) here.
September 16th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
From what I understand about CHDK you have to switch the the write-protect tab to “on” to enable the features, but the eye-fi does not have a write-protect switch. How did you get around that?
September 16th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Hey Brad, on my camera (SD700) you can boot into the firmware. To do this, you start the camera in the picture view mode, press menu, then scroll down to “firmware update”.
If your camera does not allow that, you can also use an exacto knife to cut off a chunk of the eye-fi card to make a write-protect tab. Scary, but I hear it works!