Using a Denver AC-5000W with Windows (or OS X)

Some weeks ago, the Denver AC-5000W action camera’s where for sale for around € 50. So a lot cheaper than a GoPro and thus nice for testing. As it comes with a underwater housing up capable of withstanding water pressure up to 40m of depth, it’s useful with our scuba diving hobby without spending to much (one could always buy a GoPro later).

But this blog post is not about scuba diving or GoPro versus Denver, but about getting the stuff out of the camera (preferably by Wi-Fi without opening the case). The camera supports Wi-Fi by advertising itself as a Wi-Fi hotspot with a security key ‘1234567890’.

As either the Wi-Fi connection/feature or the mobile iOS/Android software is unstable (I was not able to download all photo’s with either of them and Android was way better in it then iOS), I wanted to know how to get the photos and videos off the camera using a PC.

First I though to disassemble the Android APK file but it proved a bit hard to download this file on a PC (I needed to enter my username/password and device code in a piece of unknown software). But it was not necessary to do this at all.

Then I just tried to connect with a browser to the gateway address (192.168.1.1) of the hotspot the Denver advertises (without luck). Normally this type of devices tend to expose a embedded webserver (like the average Wi-Fi router).

Ping this IP address however worked.

To be able to see a bit more of what goes on, I started with using telnet (so see if a connection was able at all). I tried ‘telnet 192.168.1.1 http’ so a webserver, again without luck. The second try was way better, ‘telnet 192.168.1.1 ftp’ because I got a nice welcome message and a prompt for a username.

Next was finding the username and password for this embedded ftp server. First I tried ‘admin’ and as password ‘1234567890’ assuming the programmers did not want to make it that hard. No luck.

Then with a little luck I tried good old ‘root’ as username and once again ‘12345679890’ as password and to my surprise I was in.

The camera shows a simple camera alike SD layout of a root folder DCIM with subdirectories for photos and videos and a additional one for events (no clue yet what that’s for, maybe it’s used for the feature to look at the live camera picture with a mobile device).

So the directory structure is a simple

DCIM
	100EVENT
	100IMAGE
	100VIDEO

With a decent FTP client like FileZilla it’s very easy to transfer all photos and videos to a Windows PC or Apple Mac.

So just put the camera in Wi-Fi mode, connect to the ‘DENVER AC-5000W’ hotspot using ‘1234567890’ as security key.

Then setup a ftp connection to ‘192.168.1.1’ with a normal plain text username and password (‘root’ and ‘1234567890’) and start transferring your photos and videos.

Transfers run most smooth if you set your ftp client software to a single (one) transfer at a time.

Advertisement