There is, somewhat to my surprise, a standard for digital camera directory and file names, although it looks rather ad hoc and ex post facto to me, and the Cycliq Fly6 camera follows it to the, ah, letter.
In their implementation, we have nnnymmdd
, where:
- nnn = a unique, but not necessarily sequential, number
- y = last digit of year
- mm = month
- dd = day
That produces these entries in my NAS hard drive full of bicycle action camera “footage”:
ll /mnt/video/Fly6/DCIM/ total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-10 14:18 10051210 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-21 12:47 10051221 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-24 20:26 10151224 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-25 14:42 10251225 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-26 15:26 10351226 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-31 16:37 10451231 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-01-16 16:56 10560115 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-01-16 16:56 10660116 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-01-31 13:28 10760131 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-02-04 12:59 10860204 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-02-07 17:05 10960207 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-02-20 13:08 11060220 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-02-21 12:03 11160221 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-02-22 14:02 11260222 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-03-06 18:16 11360306 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-03-07 14:33 11460307 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-03-08 14:57 11560308 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-03-09 13:48 11660309 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-03-10 11:24 11760310 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-03-11 13:51 11860311 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2016-03-12 16:04 11960312 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-11-22 17:02 12051122 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-11-25 19:14 12151125 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-11-29 17:42 12251129 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-11-30 16:53 12351130 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-05 16:35 12451205 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-07 16:53 12551207 drwxr-xr-x 2 ed root 0 2015-12-08 14:05 12690102
Annoyingly, the first three digits are not in ascending order of date, perhaps because the firmware recycles numbers previously used for now-deleted directories.
The year digit 9 in the last directory (12690102
) came from the camera’s default 2009 startup date. You set the camera’s clock by editing its configuration file and rebooting that sucker, which I hadn’t done when I got a new Fly6 as a warranty replacement for the old one; apparently the battery shook itself loose after half a year of riding.
Deleting the directories created last November and December goes a little something like this:
rm -rf /mnt/video/Fly6/DCIM/???51[12]*
You probably want to dry-run that with a directory listing command (perhaps ls -al
) just to be sure it will wipe out what you want and nothing else.
Within each directory, the file names follow a more rigid hhmmnnnn
format:
- hh = hour
- mm = minute
- nnnn = ascending sequence number
Which produces a set of files like this:
ll /mnt/video/Fly6/DCIM/11960312/ total 6.6G -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 607M 2057-09-06 19:40 13120005.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 810M 2057-09-06 19:40 13190006.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 962M 2057-09-06 19:40 13290007.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 573M 2057-09-06 19:40 13390008.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 523M 2057-09-06 19:40 13470009.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 596M 2057-09-06 19:40 13570010.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 672M 2057-09-06 19:40 14070011.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 716M 2057-09-06 19:40 14150012.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 505M 2057-09-06 19:40 14250013.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 497M 2057-09-06 19:40 14350014.AVI -rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 221M 2057-09-06 19:40 14450015.AVI
The NAS drive does not, for reasons I cannot explain, record the actual file creation timestamp; touch
-ing the file afterward does update the timestamp correctly. So it goes.
The camera attempts to write the files in 10:00 minute chunks, but, because it deletes files (or, perhaps, entire directories) one-by-one in FIFO style, the actual file duration / size seems limited by the space made available by the deletions. The default 8 GB MicroSD card has something like 6.6 GB available and holds a bit under two hours of video; I should bump that to a 16 GB card to get a complete record of longer rides.