Published: Jan 5, 2023 by Isaac Johnson

This is just a quick how-to since Samsung has seemingly abondened the Gear360.

I downloaded the Gear 360 Active Director software to my host.

However, in all cases, it renders just black. Perhaps an older CPU or different OS would work.

Using Linux

I’m mostly following this guide with a few tweaks.

I pulled the videos off the camera with a Micro-USB cable and put them in all in C:/RAW360.

Our videos are spherical left right 360 videos as such:

I needed to create a map image for remapping.

$ git clone https://github.com/raboof/dualfisheye2equirectangular.git
$ cd dualfisheye2equirectangular/
$ gcc -o projection projection.c -lm

# create the mapping files
$ ./projection -x xmap_dokicam_video.pgm -y ymap_dokicam_video.pgm -h 1280 -w 2560 -r 1280 -c 2560 -b 35 -m samsung_gear_360

Should you have trouble creating them yourself, I put a copy here: xmap_dokicam_video.zip

FFMpeg

The FFMpeg bundled with Ubuntu is too old for some features. I ended up downloading the latest from their static builds

$ cd /tmp
$ cp /mnt/c/Users/isaac/Downloads/ffmpeg-release-amd64-static.tar.xz ./
$ tar xvf ffmpeg-release-amd64-static.tar.xz
$ sudo mv ffmpeg-5.1.1-amd64-static /usr/local/
$ sudo mv /usr/bin/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg.old
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/ffmpeg-5.1.1-amd64-static/ffmpeg /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg
$ ffmpeg version
ffmpeg version 5.1.1-static https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/  Copyright (c) 2000-2022 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 8 (Debian 8.3.0-6)
  ...

The next step is to take the spherical video and convert it

$ ffmpeg -i /mnt/c/RAW360/360_0243.MP4 -i xmap_dokicam_video.pgm -i ymap_dokicam_video.pgm -filter_complex remap /mnt/c/RAW360/360_0243b.MP4

Note: if you had the camera sideways, you might need to “roll” it so they are really left/right.. you can see an old forum post here, but essentially you just add ‘roll’ to your video filter; e.g. -vf v360=dfisheye:e:ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189:roll=-90

I needed to rotate (since I pushed the camera down the ice fishing hole upside down)

$ ffmpeg -i /mnt/c/RAW360/360_0243b.MP4 -vf "transpose=1, transpose=1" /mnt/c/RAW360/360_0243c.MP4

Note: there are two common ways to rotate; either rotate 90, then again ie. -vf "transpose=1, transpose=1" or 180d (e.g. -vf "rotate=PI:bilinear=0"). You can read a lot more on this here

I’ll then chain them between 3 folders.

$ cd /mnt/c/RAW360/ && find . -type f -name \*.MP4 -exec ffmpeg -i /mnt/c/RAW360/{} -i /home/builder/dualfisheye2equirectangular/xmap_dokicam_video.pgm -i /home/builder/dualfisheye2equirectangular/ymap_dokicam_video.pgm -filter_complex remap /mnt/c/FIXED360/{} \; -print

$ cd /mnt/c/FIXED360 && find . -type f -name \*.MP4 -exec ffmpeg -vf "transpose=1, transpose=1" /mnt/c/FIXEDR360/{} \; -print

Small, but here is a 1sec clip of each:

raw: /content/images/2023/01/samsung360-07.MPG
converted: /content/images/2023/01/samsung360-08.MPG
converted and rotated: /content/images/2023/01/samsung360-09.MPG

Notes

There are some other ways to convert I experimented with… the ‘-t 5’ does just 5 seconds so you can check out videos.

There are a lot of parameters for ffmpeg (the docs page practically crashes my browser)

$ ffmpeg -t 5 -i /mnt/c/RAW360/360_0243.MP4 -vf v360=dfisheye:e:ih_fov=208 -y /mnt/c/RAW360/360_0243e.MP4
$ cd /mnt/c/RAW360/ && find . -type f -name \*.MP4 -exec ffmpeg -t 5 -i /mnt/c/RAW360/{} -vf v360=dfisheye:e:ih_fov=208 -y /mnt/c/FIXED360/$ cd /mnt/c/RAW360/ && find . -type f -name \*.MP4 -exec ffmpeg -t 5 -i /mnt/c/RAW360/{} -vf v360=dfisheye:e:ih_fov=189:iv_fov189 -y /mnt/c/FIXED360/{} \; -print
$ cd /mnt/c/RAW360/ && find . -type f -name \*.MP4 -exec ffmpeg -t 5 -i /mnt/c/RAW360/{} -vf v360=dfisheye:e:ih_fov=189:iv_fov=189 -y /mnt/c/FIXED360/{} \; -print
$ cd /mnt/c/RAW360/ && find . -type f -name \*.MP4 -exec ffmpeg -t 5 -i /mnt/c/RAW360/{} -vf v360=dfisheye:e:id_fov=180 -y /mnt/c/FIXED360/{} \; -print

One very close approximation was:

ffmpeg -i /mnt/c/RAW360/360_0244.MP4 -vf v360=dfisheye:e:id_fov=270,unsharp -y -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -preset:v medium -tune:v film -movflags +faststart /mnt/c/FIXED360/360_0244xx.MP4