Ever wonder whether you could just intercept that Live View stream and save it? Well, you can. It’s just no one thought to actually try… until now.

The good news is that this hack by Olivier Giroux works. You can run it over USB and it sends out about 30 usable frames per second of JPEGs at somewhat less than VGA resolution. I guess that last part could be considered bad news.

The bad news continues in that the video is pretty crappy quality, too. Like the D90’s full-fledged video function, the video image is not formed by resampling and resizing, but by throwing away information and fitting the remainder together. I explained the process (with the awesome illustration below) in this post about why DSLR video quality was compromised. The same thing is happening here but way more severe throwaway is happening. You can see that the quality isn’t even up to YouTube standards.

Of course, Nikon never meant this (nor did Canon mean this) to be an actual video solution. It’s a hack and it acts like one, and it’s cool no matter what. Thanks to Olivier for cooking this up. We’ll update when he puts out something we can use, too.

[via Nikon Rumors]

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Video: D700 video hack