DJI Osmo fans are breaking the shackles of its closed-source camera app | The Verge

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DJI Osmo fans are breaking the shackles of its closed-source camera app

Osmosis lets you download DJI Osmo camera footage without DJI’s Mimo app.

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The DJI Osmo Pocket 4 Pro and Pocket 3, flanking my phone with the Osmosis app.

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Even if you love DJI’s drones and cameras, you might not love the company’s bloated closed-source apps that phone home to its cloud servers. But they’re the only way to easily review, manage, and wirelessly download your pocket camera’s footage on the go.

Osmosis, a free open-source app built by DJI watcher Konrad Iturbe (with help from Claude) is an attempt to change that. By reverse engineering the protocol DJI’s cameras use to talk to the official Osmo app, he built his own — which not only lets you download files, but also see thumbnails, stream low-res previews, trim clips down to size, set favorites, filter out only photos or videos or favs, and queue up just the downloads you want.

Here’s the media grid; you can tap any of those four teal buttons to filter or multi-select. You can see my SD card is mostly full, and I have 85 percent battery remaining.

I just got it working on my Osmo Pocket 3 and the Osmo Pocket 4P that I easily bought in the US; it’s also been tested on the Osmo Nano, Osmo Action 5 Pro, Osmo Action 6, and it should work on the Xtra versions of those cameras too.

This is a live low-res preview streaming from the camera to the phone. Intriguingly, I can optionally preview, and/or download files, while recording on the camera itself. The pencil button takes me to the edit-and-trim mode.

The app isn’t all that polished yet. While it’s pretty easy to pair a new camera — it automatically detects your camera wirelessly and the app can remember more than one — it always takes longer than I’d like to connect and begin paging through my media.

Press a pairing button on the app, then this screen automatically pops up on my camera.

Osmosis also doesn’t fully stow the gimbal on my Osmo Pocket 3 the way it does on the 4P below, so the lens is left exposed unless I manually fold it away. And when you’re filtering by Faved, you’re filtering the ones that you’ve hearted in Osmosis, not the ones you’ve hearted on the camera itself.

Here it is connected to the Osmo Pocket 4 Pro, where it does stow the gimbal automatically.

But it might already be good enough for my Today I’m Toying With videos. I’m always left wondering if I “got the shot” on the Osmo Pocket 3’s tiny screen, I never want to fire up the DJI Mimo app to check, and so I always wind up overshooting and transferring lots of footage I don’t need. Now, perhaps I’ll just review it all, delete what I don’t want, trim what I do, and make my selects in Osmosis instead.

Osmosis isn’t the only open-source app coming to replace DJI’s Mimo. I’m looking forward to trying Open Pocket Cine, an ambitious field monitor app for the Osmo Pocket lineup that offers custom LUTs (which I as an amateur don’t use) and things like focus peaking and zebras (which I absolutely would because it’s tough to gauge focus and exposure on the Pocket’s tiny screen). It’s from the developer of Open ZCine for Nikon Z cameras, which I also haven’t tried yet.

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