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My older GoPro 2 would appear as if it were just a "regular" external drive when plugged in via USB. However, my new GoPro 4 Silver appears as a "GoPro MTP Client Disk Volume" instead. This causes me a number of problems:

  1. I have scripts written that expect an addressable drive letter, and since the new "client disk volume" doesn't have a drive letter, they don't work.

  2. When I open a large video file, rather than playing immediately from the beginning of the file and being able to seek through (using VLC or similar) the new "client disk" appears to copy the entire file across the (relatively slow) USB connection and only then starts to play. For very large files this really slows things down.

Any suggestions how to get the older, much more friendly behavior back?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Is any part of your question about creating still images? That is the scope of this site. There are other stackexchange communities for video production and for solving problems connecting devices to computers. \$\endgroup\$
    – Michael C
    Commented Aug 3, 2016 at 19:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ Try posting your question here video.stackexchange.com \$\endgroup\$
    – kazanaki
    Commented Aug 4, 2016 at 7:45
  • \$\begingroup\$ I want to link to a "why should I use a card reader" question, but can't find one... \$\endgroup\$
    – Dan Wolfgang
    Commented Aug 4, 2016 at 12:53
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    \$\begingroup\$ Worth reviewing: photo.stackexchange.com/questions/3345/…, photo.stackexchange.com/questions/14669/… \$\endgroup\$
    – Dan Wolfgang
    Commented Aug 4, 2016 at 12:55
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    \$\begingroup\$ Michael: Thanks - my apologies for the wrong place, I searched for gopro tags within stackexchange and landed here. Dan: I'm very aware of the benefits of a card reader, but the gopro is mounted in such a way that it's quite inconvenient and time consuming to get the card out, whereas I can plug a USB cable directly into the camera while mounted. \$\endgroup\$
    – ljwobker
    Commented Aug 4, 2016 at 15:05

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Modern USB devices use newer MTP/PTP protocols while older devices used a legacy "USB mass storage device" protocol. You can likely switch between MTP and PTP on the GoPro, but I'm willing to bet the new model won't support "mass storage" any more. I agree that it may have seemed friendlier, but there are technical reasons why it was potentially harmful or at least problematic. Mass storage devices need to be accessed by a single device exclusively, at a time. The GoPro counts as one of those devices.

Your best bet, if you want actual mass storage type access to the data would be to remove the memory card and place it into a reader.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Very helpful - I'd not heard of MTP/PTP but with that as a search term I was able to figure out what I needed. Sadly, the key part of what I need to do is to be able to seek the file directly -- I want to be able to view/scan/seek into a very large video file WITHOUT copying it off the goPro first. This link was helpful: forums.androidcentral.com/general-help-how/… \$\endgroup\$
    – ljwobker
    Commented Aug 4, 2016 at 21:35

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