Gphoto2 Capture Video and Download

Question

I have used gphoto in the past to capture images and download them directly to my computer instead of using the sd card in the camera. I am wondering if it is possible to do this for videos as well or to copy the file video file to the computer upon successful recording. I am looking for the video/movie equivalent to --capture-image-and-download or another program that can accomplish this with a DSLR from the command line

Answer 1

Depend of your DSLR but is possible, see the commande line here ("Movie Capture"): http://gphoto.org/doc/remote/

Edit :

Capturing movies with sound is currently possible with:

Newer Nikon DSLRs: gphoto2 --set-config movie=1 --wait-event=10s --set-config movie=0 --wait-event-and-download=2s. Replace 10s by the number of seconds you want to have your movie long. This started being supported around 2012, around the D7000 release.

Newer Canon EOS DSLRs (around 7D and later) : Switch the camera to movie record mode on the camera. Then run gphoto2 --set-config viewfinder=1 --set-config movierecordtarget=Card --wait-event=10s --set-config movierecordtarget=None --wait-event-and-download=2s (before 2.5.6, replace viewfinder by eosviewfinder). If this does not work, check and switch the capturetarget to SD Card (gphoto2 --set-config capturetarget=1)

Older cameras with preview capture ability: gphoto2 --capture-movie=10s . This will capture 10 seconds of preview frames and concatenate them in a MotionJPEG style stream.

For Canon you need to change --set-config movierecordtarget=Card to --set-config movierecordtarget=0 and --set-config movierecordtarget=None to --set-config movierecordtarget=1.