more a comment/question than issue.... why not gphoto?

[totoantibes]

Hi,

I am a longtime user of Lumix cameras. I have developed an ASCOM driver for Lumix interface over http and wifi. this works well (on ascom obviously) but also on Lunix i have worked with Marcus Meisner to include Lumix also on libgphoto2. We managed to get the HTTP/Wifi as well as the native USB tether mode working on Linux at the time. I have not followed up much since i am now on Nina but might be worthwhile checking that history.

might speed up your efforts.

Thanks

[njfdev]

Hello, thanks for bringing this up. I briefly looked at gphoto2 a while ago when deciding how I would do things, but moved on when my specific camera wasn’t in the supported camera list. However, I never actually ended up testing it out. I’m currently on vacation, but I will check it out when I get back and update this issue when I do.

[njfdev]

I have had a look at gphoto and tried to use it with my camera. I only tried the USB tether mode, which connects and allows me to take photos. However, downloading the images (which is very important for my use case) does not work. Before making this repo, I tried implementing my own USB Lumix driver, and could not figure out how to properly download images. I assume it has to do with my camera being a newer model (the Lumix S5II released about a year and a half ago).

I haven't tried the gphoto WiFi capabilities yet. However, I would prefer USB as it would be faster and more reliable.

I currently connect my controller and the camera to my local WiFi network, but I plan to test out a local hotspot as that might be faster and more reliable.

[totoantibes]

i have now published a Nina plugin for Lumix leveraging the official panasonic sdk. it uses the USB connection. You can find it here. It leverages the DLL of the SDK that i have wrapped for C#. so not sure if this is of any help on linux. Note however that the SDK is a (and its doc and .h) is a reduced version of the capabilities offered by the lumix tether app. this has been confirmed by the pana team. (for reference the sdk dll is 200KB while the tether app dll is 500KB!).
With the nina plugin i can control the session via usb, save the raw images very quickly and also perform liveview.

As for your use case (which i guess would be livestacking) i found that over WIFI the transfer of the raw is really slow and fails often even with retry mechanisms in the download. this is true over the camera AP or a house based AP.

you can also reach out to Markus of libgphoto and share our USB dump to include your camera in the net release...