Nikon D5100 Video Beta Testers Wanted

Posted on 30 March, 2012 by Simeon

The Nikon Hackers team would like to announce the release of the first hack for the D5100: Removing time limit restrictions on video recording.

The FirmwarePatch tool is available here (now v1.1), it’s a .Net application, so you will need the 4.0 Framework installed. It should run under Mono.

To use:

1. Download the D5100 firmware
2. Download the FirmwarePatch tool
3. From a command prompt run the patch tool with the first argument pointing to the location of the above firmware
4. Copy the resulting output to your SD card and remove the “.patched” extension
5. Upgrade firmware from D5100 menu, as per the normal Nikon instructions

This should not brick your camera, but if it does I and the other Nikon Hacker team members will not have/take responsibility for any damages or liability. 

I have this firmware on my camera, and have taken a 25 minute video with it, but result may vary. Also damages that may occur due to camera operation times longer than specified by original manufacturer are your responsibility.

The Nikon Hacker forums is the place for discussing this patch, future patchs, or just to get involved.

We would like to invite any interested developers to help progress the firmware decoding process.

Soon we will be releasing the same patch for D3100 and D7000 camera’s but we have not tested these patches at all, so we are looking for VERY KEEN Alpha testers to try it out these changes. Contact me directly (simeon@simeonpilgrim.com) if you are interested and don’t mind possibly bricking your camera. If you don’t know what bricking means, don’t apply.

[update] If you apply the patch please report results here or On this Nikon Hackers Forum post