Foolography Community

Hi there,

I had asked this question before and it was said it cannot be done. However i have seen other bluetooth devices work with live view. Any chance we can get this on this unit?

Thanks!

I’d love to know, too!
Although your post is old, I don’t know if it’s resolved as of yet or not ....

Unfortunately, no positive news here.
We did put a lot of effort into trying to get this to work, and while it may have worked acceptably on a handful of cameras, on many others the best scenario would have been 1 frame every 3 seconds.

We even implemented a very awesome lean jpg re-encoder from scratch that's able to run on the small microprocessors with extremely limited resources, but in the end had to realize that the bottleneck is the speed at which we can get the live-view data from the camera via USB, and very little chance of optimization there. We haven't given up entirely, but had to put this feature on ice to focus our efforts on the ones that will turn out great!

Just for your information: Most other implementations of live view via Bluetooth use Bluetooth Classic, which in a best case scenario can have a bandwidth of up to 24Mbps, compared to the 1Mbps of Bluetooth 4.2 or 2Mbps of Bluetooth 5.0. In addition to that, the 1 or 2 Mbps maximum is impossible to reach, so you can assume you might be able to achieve about half of that.

However, the most important piece of the puzzle is the kind of data that gets transferred. All DSLRs only provide individual frames as jpg images, which we have to retrieve and can transfer one by one. The closest "codec" this could compare to is MJPEG. Any modern system would use a codec such as H.264, which requires only 2-20% of the bandwidth that MJPEG requires while delivering the same quality. Have a look here: https://ipvm.com/reports/h264-mjpeg-ban ... ality-test If you're interested. The even newer H.265/HVEC can reduce the required bandwidth even further, so it could be great over BLE. This is how the Apple watch can deliver smooth live-view of the iPhone camera over BLE. But H.264 or H.265 require hardware-accellerated encoding and decoding. Our extremely small low-power microprocessors unfortunately do not have this capability...

Thanks for giving feedback to such long-lasting questions, that's really great! It's a shame that the live view function can't be achieved, but software can't overcome hardware issues. Could the latest, top-of-the-line cameras handle this, or is it still out of reach for them?

Well, the "trend" is higher resolution, higher quality live-view, which of course means higher bandwidth.

some brands take that opportunity to add settings to control the quality (so we could try to choose the lower qualities for a usable frame rate), on others it just means higher data rates by default...