I am able to tether my camera through darktable, using gphoto2. I’m on Ubuntu. The only issue is that live view isn’t working. I can’t see the display on my computer.
Everything else seems to be working fine: I can capture, and I appear to be able to change settings from within Darktable. But it would be nice to get the live view working. Has anyone had any luck with this? Where would be a good place to start troubleshooting this? When I run darktable from the terminal, it doesn’t throw any errors when I mount and tether.
It looks like I can also activate live view through gphoto2 CLI (or at least try to). I can send the stream to my browser, or to /dev/video and maybe I can then see it on VLC. I’ll mess with this in the meantime. If someone knows a good, quick, surefire way to determine if live view works, from gphoto2, please let me know. Thanks.
Thanks for the quick reply. Specs are below.
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS
gphoto2 2.5.28 gcc, popt(m), exif, cdk, aa, jpeg, readline
libgphoto2 2.5.31 standard camlibs, gcc, no ltdl, EXIF
libgphoto2_port 0.12.2 iolibs: disk ptpip serial usb1 usbdiskdirect usbscsi, gcc, no ltdl, EXIF, USB, serial without locking
According to this page: gPhoto - Projects :: libgphoto2 :: supported cameras
Your camera doesn’t support live view.
Thanks for the link. I just bookmarked it, and I won’t bother trying to stream through the gphoto2 CLI since it explicitly says live view is unsupported.
It looks like Sony released a number of these Alpha series mirrorless cameras starting around 2013—2015, with updated models starting in 2016. The ones from 2016 and newer offer Live view with gphoto, but not before — with the exception of the 5100, which was apparently released in 2014, the same year as my a6000.
Anyway, I opened a feature request on github in the hope that support may become available. May be a long shot with an 11-year-old camera, though. We’ll see. Thanks for your help.