Transcend DrivePro 200 Hack To Stream And Script; Begs For More

Transcend markets their DrivePro 200 camera for use as a car dashcam. We’re a bit surprised at the quality and apparent feature set for something relegated to a rather mundane task as this. But [Gadget Addict] poked around and found a nice little nugget: you can live stream the video via WiFi; the framerate, quality, and low-lag are pretty impressive. In addition to that, the next hack is just waiting for you to unlock it.

As it stands right now you turn on the camera’s built-in WiFi AP, telnet into two different ports on the device (sending it into smartphone connected mode) and you’ll be able to live stream the view to your computer using RTSP. Great, that in itself is a good hack and we’re sure that before long someone will figure out an automatic way to trigger this. [GA] also found out how to get the thing into script mode at power-on. He hasn’t actually executed any code… that’s where you come in. If you have one of these pull it out and get hacking! It’s a matter put putting files on the SD storage and rebooting. Crafting this file to enable shell access would open up an entire world of hacks, from things like time-lapse and motion sensing to special processing and filtering in real time. We think there’s huge potential so keep us up-to-date as you find new ways to pwn this hardware.

19 thoughts on “Transcend DrivePro 200 Hack To Stream And Script; Begs For More

  1. Nice find and hack, on a plus side it records fullhd
    but most likely streams 720p, and MJPEG :((((((, and >$100

    Now if you want 720p h.264 streaming on the cheap, and when I say cheap I mean half rasppi+camera price, there is “banana pi BPI-D1”
    It appears to be a devboard for a network camera with SDcard storage and USB port (for wifi/ethernet dongle) costing $39 (aliexpress free shipping)

    http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/11/13/linux-based-bpi-d1-hd-camera-module-features-anyka-ak3918-arm9-processor/
    FULL kernel sourcecode released :O, even hardware h264 encoder(!!! might be the first) and camera interface (unlike pee)
    https://github.com/Lamobo/lamobo-d1

  2. This is very cool. I have the same camera and I could never work out how to enable the streaming mobile mode, let alone find the stream URL itself.

    The problem is that only one device can connect to the DrivePro at a time. So it’s hard to setup any software to sniff the data. The only way I can think to do it is jailbreak my android to get a shell, sniff and dump all traffic on the android while it’s connected to the DrivePro and then import that data into WireShark afterwards.

    After this video, I connected to port 9001 and 9002 and sure enough it went into the streaming mobile mode. i noticed the DrivePro is sending file names in one of the telnet sessions. So I’d assume we could also select those files for playback somehow.

    Ultimately it’s the shell access I’m interested in. Reading through the firmware DP200.bin, It looks like you could easily have this camera join an existing network instead of operating in AP mode.

    So much potential here!

    1. Connect your phone to an AP, which is wired to another device in client-bridge mode, which connects to the DrivePro? Then sniff the wired side…

      I’m pretty sure Windows can do this natively with the virtualwifi interface.

  3. This all sounds very familiar to the Transcend WiFi SD card hack last year. I remember that having some kind of boot script thing too. I wonder if it’s the same mechanism ??

  4. i have a 3G connection in my car. It would be awesome if we could script the camera to auto upload the recorded clips to Youtube ! Or even the live stream if my connection was strong enough. Would be awesome for some of our big drive events.

  5. It is a cool hack but at $130, the Drive Pro isn’t exactly cheap, as oppose to say just use your cell phone? I mean, it got a camera? There is also the Sony QX10 that has a decent 10X lens for $200.

  6. The nearby lag effect could either over-saturation of the input due to signal strength, or interference from the laptop’s electronics. And I would think it would be the latter.

  7. Did some testing and the lag is from vlc program when using other software without the buffer lag it reduce to less then 1/2 second.
    Found it also streams on port 80.

    Interesting equipment

  8. How did you find the range on the built in AP? Do you think mounting this to a quadcopter and streaming to a tablet or similar live video (e.g using it as a cheap alternative to a FPV controller) would be possible?

  9. Great video and description. Just wanted to check on two things. 1. What is the imageresolution on the frame ? 2. Do know what is bit rate? I have tried a few other cameras like foscam and ddpai. Their live streams much crappy parameters than what u use for storing. It was be great to know before I buy onw of these. Thanks apprecjate it.

  10. I got to stream the transcend DrivePro 50 to VLC and directly on the browser. Just type in http://192.168.1.254:8192 and it starts streaming to the browser. For VLC, use open network stream with above link. Unfortunately, streaming quality is pretty poor 320×192 pixels. It streams at 30fps and a bit rate of 5Mbps. It has 3 open ports on the IP address 80, 3333 and 8192. It streams 320×192 on the 8192 port. I know for a fact that Yi DashCam streams on 3333 on the same IP address. Just wondering if DrivePro 50 supports different streaming configuration on that port 3333..But the poor streaming resolution makes it virtually useless for any type of streaming applications.. If anyone has ideas of making it stream at higher resolution please suggest.

  11. Is that delay something you created in the settings or is it always like that? If an accident was to happen the camera might not catch it in time because of the input delay, while it’s not massive it could still be an issue.

  12. I’m just following the thread hoping some of what others have done here works for me.

    I opened the video stream on VLC with a DrivePro 550, using the IP: http://192.168.1.254:8192

    I had lag using an 802.11n WIFI connection, using a small USB dongle on my host PC.

    I then tried an 802.11n connection with another WIFI adapter with a pair of antennae, and the stream looks usable, a slight lag, about 2s.

    I did not try to evaluate the differences in WIFI adapters much, and noticed my connection strength wasn’t excellent anyway.

    The VLC codec info shows it at 640×360 resolution, which is lower than I hoped, and it did not show FPS directly.

    I couldn’t get fraps working with VLC quickly, so gave that up.

    I think I should be able to broadcast from VLC through my local network out to the Internet, to view on an Ipad remotely for example.

    But Ideally I wish I knew how to make the DrivePro connect to my internal network.

    How did you guys determine to use 192.168.1.254 to begin with, is this just a sniffing proggie?

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