OpenMemories: Tweak

An app to unlock settings on your Sony camera.

• Remove the 30min video recording limit
• Unlock the language menu
• Disable the NTSC nag screen
• For developers: Enable telnet and adb daemons

Installation

Please read this section for up-to-date information on installing the app.

Compatibility

This app should be compatible with all Sony cameras supporting PlayMemories Camera Apps (PMCA). See here for a full list.

A word of caution

This is not an official Sony application. All information has been found through reverse engineering. Even though everything worked fine for our developers, it could cause harm to your hardware. If you break your camera, you get to keep both pieces. We won't take any responsibility.

Usage

After installation, you should find the app in the "Application List" on your camera.

• Use the menu button to exit the app
• The app writes a log to the SD card (TWEAKLOG.TXT)

There are several different tabs:

Video

Remove the 30 minute recording limit and enjoy (almost) unlimited video recording.

Additionally, remove the 5 minute 4K recording limit on the RX100M4.

Region

Is your camera locked to Japanese? Is it set to the wrong region? Unlock all 30+ languages.

Is your camera locked to NTSC? Enable the PAL / NTSC selector.

Does your camera show you the NTSC nag screen on every startup? Disable the PAL / NTSC selector to get rid of the nag screen.

Protection

Use this option only if you're asked to do so. Some of the above settings may fail because your settings file is locked. Disable the protection here. In practice, it should only matter to this app if your settings are protected or not. Otherwise, this won't change anything. We still recommend re-enabling protection after you're done tweaking your settings.

Developer

Wifi

Check the "Enable Wifi" checkbox to permanently connect the camera to your wifi access point.

Don't forget to increase the "Power save start time" in the menu, or the camera may turn off automatically after a few minutes.

Once wifi is enabled, you can run and connect to the following daemons:

Telnet

To get a root shell on your camera, check the "Enable Telnet" checkbox. This starts a telnet daemon listening on port 23. Connect to it via wifi.

A few special commands you can run:

To run an Android shell

android_console.sh

To dump the firmware to the sdcard

On Android 2:

dd if=/dev/nflasha of=/android/mnt/sdcard/DUMP.DAT bs=1M

On Android 4:

dd if=/dev/nflasha of=/android/storage/sdcard0/DUMP.DAT bs=1M

This operation will take some time (it copies about 500MB). Use fwtool.py to unpack the dump file.

ADB

To install and debug Android apps from your computer, check the "Enable ADB" checkbox. This starts an ADB daemon listening on port 5555. Connect to it via wifi:

adb connect <your camera's ip>

FAQ

How does it all work?

nex-hack managed to decrypt firmware updates (see fwtool.py for a more recent unpacker). The PMCA-RE project reverse engineered how apps are installed. This allows us to run custom code. With the knowledge from the firmware, we found out how settings are stored on the camera (hint: in a file called Backup.bin). We can now change these settings directly, also the ones locked by Sony.

It doesn't work for me!

First, thanks for testing. If you encounter a bug, please open an issue!

How can I remove the app?

You can uninstall it normally with the "Application Management" app. The modified settings are preserved even if you remove the app.

What happens if i do a factory reset?

Some settings might be removed, others will be permanent. We still have to investigate a bit more to find out which features are reset and how. In the worst case, you can reinstall the app (all apps are removed in a factory reset) and apply the settings again.

What happens if i do a firmware update?

See above.

I have an old camera that doesn't support apps

Depending on your camera, tweaks may be applied using a method based on the firmware update process: More information

Can you add feature X?

Keep in mind that this app can only change settings that are already there and just hidden by Sony. However, there are still about 15 000 entries in the settings file. So finding out what a particular setting does is quite an effort. But if you have ideas, feel free to open an issue!