This page is going to be random notes and discoveries about my new Insta360 Pro 2 VR camera. The camera is impressive. The documentation, not so much. I will likely take sections of this stream of conscience and make them into their own pages once I have enough information.
The camera runs Linux for Tegra inside (Ubuntu 16). It has two “modes”; the normal mode where you use it to take pictures or videos, and the storage mode, where it presents the storage to a computer. As you would expect, it’s a very old version of linux that has not been patched since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. I am afraid to patch it as that might very well break the camera.
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.38 aarch64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
693 packages can be updated.
443 updates are security updates.In storage mode, it speaks the horrendous RNDIS protocol, which means you cannot directly access it on a Mac. There is one driver out there for the Mac, but it’s been abandoned since 2018, and while it’s the “official” solution, it’s not a good one. I, personally, will not be installing a kernel extension that hasn’t been updated in 6 generations of the kernel.
After some testing, I did find that it has an ssh server (completely undocumented), that still has the default user and password of an nVidia Tegra development system:
Default Hostname: tegra-ubuntu
Username: nvidia
Password: nvidiaI am not sure if it will break anything if I change those, so I am going to leave them that way for now. It’s insane that companies still don’t change the default passwords on devices no matter how many hacks show up in the news. That being said, the camera has no authentication with its own applications as well, so if you put the camera on your network, anyone on that network can access it trivially.
Unfortunately, when it’s in normal mode, only the “main” SD card is available. This contains only the preview images and metadata for the video content on the other cards. It does, however, contain all you need for still photos to be opened in their stitcher.
The “Pro” app, unlike its consumer brother, is Intel only on the Mac, so not as performative for their expensive equipment as their inexpensive counterparts. Unfortunately, this seems to be very common in software. The expensive stuff gets a lot less love than the low end stuff.
On Windows (and presumably linux; I have to test that still), the USB-C connector (also completely undocumented) shows up as a USB network device, speaking RNDIS (a terrible protocol in its own right). You can mount the data via SMB, or use ssh/sftp/rsync via the above credentials (they work in both camera modes).
The WLAN interface is disabled in storage mode, but looks like it could be enabled. I will experiment with that and see if I can get wireless access to the device by putting it on my LAN while in storage mode. These are things that Insta360 could enable for users and configure via their apps/API. But for some reason, so much of the hardware is software disabled, no doubt to protect users from themselves, but annoying nonetheless.
Changing the hostname from “tegra-ubuntu” to something more… useful… breaks the application, and none of the icons appear. So no touching the hostname unless it’s a setting in the application that can be changed to match whatever better name you want to use.
When the camera is in storage mode, it can still be accessed via ssh the same way at ip address 192.168.1.188. The stitching software does not know how to handle the separate file structure as stored on the camera, so they have to be merged. Here is a script that will do that for you, and place the various PIC and VID folders into your current directory, ready to be dragged into the stitcher.
#!/bin/bash
#######################################################################
# Script to pull photos and videos from an Insta360 Pro 2
# and merge the separate media into single folders that will
# import into the really bad stitching software.
#
# It will copy the PIC and VID folders into the current working
# directory.
#
# To speed things up, I pull from all 7 cards in parallel, so you
# get better use of your gigabit ethernet.
#
# Once it completes, you can drag one or more of the PIC and VID
# folders into the stitcher to be processed.
#
# -- Scott Garrett
#
#######################################################################
rsync -avhP nvidia@192.168.1.188:/mnt/sdcard/ . &
rsync -avhP nvidia@192.168.1.188:/mnt/mSD1/ . &
rsync -avhP nvidia@192.168.1.188:/mnt/mSD2/ . &
rsync -avhP nvidia@192.168.1.188:/mnt/mSD3/ . &
rsync -avhP nvidia@192.168.1.188:/mnt/mSD4/ . &
rsync -avhP nvidia@192.168.1.188:/mnt/mSD5/ . &
rsync -avhP nvidia@192.168.1.188:/mnt/mSD6/ . &
wait