This is a throwback post, but I never documented my experience regarding hacking the Palm Pre.  To the best of my knowledge, this is how things went down.

Background

Back when the Palm Pre was released, it wasn’t quite a finished product.  Yes, WebOS was a pretty awesome OS at the time, and the hardware keyboard was a nice touch.  Except critical functionality, besides a shortage of apps developed for WebOS, was missing from the phone.

One of the biggest complaints was the lack of video recording for the Pre’s built-in camera.  I know many people were looking into a homebrew solution for this, so I thought I’d start doing some research and see if I could contribute.

Plan of Attack

The first step I took was to research the hardware involved.  It turns out that the CCD camera chip used in the Pre was the same as the one used in the OLPC (XO laptop).  Knowing that the OLPC offered video chat capabilities, I started researching how those were implemented.

I had already rooted my Pre and had command line access.  The next step was seeing what software was already loaded onto the Pre.

In one example for the XO laptop, Gstreamer was used to pull video from the camera.  I lucked out and realized that Gstreamer was already installed on the Pre, including a number of encoders /decoders muxers/demuxers and video and audio sinks.  It was just a matter of hoping the encoders were actually implemented properly, and that I could actually pipe data through them, and ultimately to the file system.

Results!

After a great deal of dabbling at the command line, I was able to pipe raw H.264 video to the file system, a file which was then playable in VLC despite having no file container surrounding it properly:

(make sure FS is rw)
mount -o remount,rw /
gst-launch camsrc ! palmvideoencoder ! filesink location=/media/internal/downloads/foo.mp4
mount -o remount,ro /


A wiki post detailing my original hack is located at WebOS Internals.  I’ve also attached the first successful video (foo) that I was able to record — it was like 4AM and me sitting at my desk in the dark, hoping that the hack session would pay off!  Ultimately, it did.

I’m writing this article years after the fact, but in 2013 I actually ran into a guy and we were talking about the Pre, and I had mentioned I was the guy who performed the original video hack and he remembered it.  Kind of cool to have a little geek street cred!  The original Pre Central post on the topic is located here.