> Magic Lantern is a free software add-on that runs from the SD/CF card and adds a host of new features to Canon EOS cameras that weren't included from the factory by Canon.
It also backports new features to old Canon cameras that aren't supported anymore, and is generally just a really impressive feat of both (1) reverse engineering and (2) keeping old hardware relevant and useful.
More backstory: before the modern generation of digital cameras - Magic Lantern was one of the early ways to "juice" more power out of early generations of Canon cameras, including RAW video recording.
Today, cameras like Blackmagic and editing platforms like DaVinci handle RAW seamlessly, but it wasn't like this even a few years ago.
I wish there are similar projects for other camera brands like Fujifilm. With abilities of ML on old Canon cameras we know there is a lot of potential in those old machines across other brands. It is also "eco" friendly approach that should be supported.
I just switched from Canon to Fujifilm due to enshitification. Canon started charging $5/mo to get clean video out of their cameras. We're plenty screwed if manufacturers decide that cameras are subscriptions and not glass.
Thanks to all who are sharing their appreciation for this niche but cool project.
I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions.
Got a Canon DSLR or mirrorless and like a bit of software reverse engineering? Consider joining in; it's quite an approachable hardware target. No code obfuscation, just classic reversing. You can pick up a well supported cam for a little less than $100. Cams range from ARMv5te up to AArch64.
What's the situation re: running on actual hardware these days? I was experimenting around with my 4000D but when it came to trying to actually run my code on the camera rather than the emulator, a1ex told me I needed some sort of key or similar. He told me he'd sign it for me or something but he got busy and I never heard back.
Is this situation still the same? (Apologies for the hazy details -- this was 5 years ago!)
That must have been a few years back. I think you're talking about enabling "camera bootflag". We provide an automated way to do this for new installs on release builds, but don't like to make this too easy before we have stable builds ready. People do the weirdest stuff, including trying to flash firmware that's not for their cam, in order to run an ML build for that different cam...
Anyway, I can happily talk you through how to do it. Our discord is probably easiest, or you can ask on the forum. Discord is linked from the forum: https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/
Whatever code you had back then won't build without some updates. 4000D is a good target for ML, lots of features that could be added.
Wow, newly supported models is super exciting to see! I have a 5d mk iii which I got specifically to play around with ML. I haven't done much videography in my life, but do plan to get some b-roll at the very least with my mk iii or maybe record some friends live events sometime.
> I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions.
Well, you asked for it!
One question I've always wondered about the project is: what is the difference between a model that you can support, and a model you currently can't? Is there a hard line where ML future compatibility becomes a brick wall? Are there models where something about the hardware / firmware makes you go 'ooh, that's a good candidate! I bet we can get that one working next'?
Also, as someone from the outside looking in who would be down to spend $100 to see if this something I can do or am interested in, which (cheap) model would be the easiest to grab and load up as dev environment (or in a configuration that mimics what someone might do to work on a feature), and where can I find documentation on how to do that? Is there a compendium of knowledge about how these cameras work from a reverse-engineering angle, or does everyone cut their teeth on forum posts and official canon technical docs?
edit: Found the RE guide on the website, gonna take a look at this later tonight
5D3 is perhaps the best currently supported ML cam for video. It's very capable - good choice. Using both CF and SD cards simultaneously, it can record at about 145MB/s, so you can get very high quality footage.
Re what we can support - it's a reverse engineering project, we can support anything with enough time ;) The very newest cams have software changes that make enabling ML slightly harder for normal users, but don't make much difference from a developer perspective. I don't see any signs of Canon trying to lock out reverse engineers. Gaining access and doing a basic, ML GUI but no features port, is not hard when you have experience.
What we choose to support: I work on the cams that I have. And the cams that I have are whatever I find for cheap, so it's pretty random. Other devs have whatever priorities they have :)
The first cam I ported to was 200D, unsupported at the time. This took me a few months to get ML GUI working (with no features enabled), and I had significant help. Now I can get a new cam to that standard in a few days in most cases. All the cams are fairly similar for the core OS. It's the peripherals that change the most as hardware improves, so this takes the most time. And the newer the camera, the more the hw and sw has diverged from the best supported cams.
The cheapest way for you to get started is to use your 5D3 - which you can do in our fork of qemu. You can dump the roms (using software, no disassembly required), then emulate a full Canon and ML GUI, which can run your custom ML changes. There are limitations, mostly around emulation of peripherals. It's still very useful if you want to improve / customise the UI.
Re docs - they're not in a great shape. It's scattered over a few different wikis, a forum, and commit messages in multiple repos. Quick discussion happens on Discord. We're very responsive there, it's the best place for dev questions. The forum is the best single source for reference knowledge. From a developer perspective, I have made some efforts on a Dev Guide, but it's far from complete, e.g.:
If you want physical hardware to play with (it is more fun after all), you might be able to find a 650d or 700d for about $100. Anything that's Digic 5 green here is a capable target:
Just wanted to say thanks for keeping this alive! I used magic lantern in 2014 to unlock 4K video recording on my Canon. It was how students back then could start recording professional video without super expensive gear
I still shoot a 5Dmkii solely due to the ML firmware. It's primarily a timelapse camera at this point. The ETTR functionality is one of my absolute favorites. The biggest drawback I have is trying to shoot with an interval less than 5 seconds. The ML software gets confused and shoots irregular interval shots. Anything over 5 seconds, and it's great. No external timers necessary for the majority of my shooting. I do still have an external for when <5s intervals are necessary. I'm just waiting for the shutter to die, but I'm confident I'll just have it replaced and continue using the body+ML rather than buy yet another body.
Thanks for your work keeping it going, and for those that have worked on it before.
Strange, it certainly can do sub 5s on some bodies. But I don't have a 5d2 to test with.
Could this be a conflict with long exposures? Conceivably AF, too. The intervalometer will attempt to trigger capture every 5s wall time. If the combined time to AF seek, expose, and finish saving to card (etc) is >5s, you will skip a shot.
When the time comes, compare the price of a used 5d3 vs a shutter replacement on the 5d2, maybe you'll get a "free" upgrade :) Thanks for the kind words!
I just want to say "thank you." I run Magic Lantern on my Canon 5D Mark III (5d3) and it is such awesome software.
I am a hobbyist nature photographer and it helped me capture some incredible moments. Though I have a Canon R7, the Canon 5d3 is my favorite camera because I prefer the feel of DSLR optical viewfinders when viewing wildlife subjects, and I prefer certain Canon EF lenses.
You're a better photographer than I am. I'm glad if ML helped you.
Please recruit your programmer friends to the cause :) The R7 is a target cam, but nobody has started work on it yet. There is some early work on the R5 and R6. I don't remember for the R7, but from the age and tier, this may be one of the new gen quad core AArch64.
I expect these modern cams to be powerful enough to run YOLO on cam, perhaps with sub 1s latency. Could be some fun things to do there.
Hey just want to say a massive thank you for everything you've done with this project. I've shot so much (short films, music videos, even a TV pilot!) on my pair of 600Ds and ML has given these cams such an extended life.
I recently obtained an astro converted 6D. Have played around with CHDK a long time ago as a teenager but never magic lantern.
I am a compiler dev with decent low level skills, anything in particular I should look at that would be good for the project as well as my ‘new’ 6D? (No experience with video unfortunately)
I have a newer R62 as well, but would rather not try anything with it yet.
I've had a fun idea knocking around for a while for astro. These cams have a fairly accessible serial port, hidden under the thumb grip rubber. I think the 6D may have one in the battery grip pins, too. We can sample LV data at any time, and do some tricks to boost exposure for "night vision". Soooo, you could turn the cam itself into a star tracker, which controlled a mount over serial. While doing the photo sequence. I bet you could do some very cool tricks with that. Bit involved for a first time project though :D
The 6D is a fairly well understood and supported cam, and your compiler background should really help you - so really the question is what would you like to add? I can then give a decent guess about how hard various things might be. I believe the 6D has integrated Wifi. We understand the network stack (surprisingly standard!) and a few demo things have been written, but nothing very useful so far. Maybe an auto image upload service? Would be cool to support something like OAuth, integrate with imgur etc?
It's slow work, but hopefully you don't mind that too much, compilers have a similar reputation.
I would love to add it to my 1Ds3. I recall reading that once upon a time Canon wrote ML devs a strongly worded letter telling them not to touch a 1D, but a camera that old is long obsolete.
(I literally only want a raw histogram)
(I also have a 1Dx2 but that's probably a harder port)
I have been toying with the idea of picking up an old 1D. I can't remember the guy's name that I saw do this, but he had his 1D modified to use a PL mount instead of an EF mount. Something about the 1D body (being thicker I guess) allowed for the flange distances to work out. He then mounted a $35,000 17mm wide angle to it. That lens was huge and could just suck in photons. With that lens, he could expose the night sky in 1/3 second exposures what would take multiple seconds on my gear. He mounted the camera to the front of his boat floating down river using night vision goggles to see where he was going. The images were fantastic. I always wanted to do something crazy like that
Canon have never had any contact with ML project for any reason, to the best of my knowledge. The decision to stay away from 1D series was made by ML team, I would say out of an abundance of caution to try not to annoy them.
I stand by my statement! Compare the length of the C standard to JS / ECMAScript, or C++! :)
Maaaaybe I'm hiding a tradeoff around complexity vs built-in features, but volunteers can work that out themselves later on.
You honestly don't need much knowledge of C to get started in some areas. The ML GUI is easy to modify if you stay within the lines. Other areas, e.g., porting a complex feature to a new camera, are much harder. But that's the life of a reverse engineer.
Conversely, the terseness of the C standard also means there's many more footguns and undefined behaviors. There are many things C is, but being easy to pick up is not one of them. I loved C all the way up until I graduated uni, but it would be a very hard sell to get me to pick it for a project these days. To me, working with C is akin to working with assembly, you just feel that you're doing real programming, but realistically there's better options for most scenarios these days.
> We're using Git now. We build on modern OSes with modern tooling. We compile clean, no warnings. This was a lot of work, and invisible to users, but very useful for devs. It's easier than ever to join as a dev.
Very impressive! Thankless work. A reminder to myself to chase down some warnings in projects I am a part of...
It’s not too difficult, if you do it from the start, and by habit.
I have an xcconfig file[0], that I add to all my projects, that turns on treat warnings as errors, and enables all warnings. In C, I used to compile -wall.
I also use SwiftLint[1].
But these days, I almost never trigger any warnings, because I’ve developed the habit of good coding.
Since Magic Lantern is firmware, I’m surprised that this was not already the case. Firmware needs to be as close to perfect as possible (I used to write firmware. It’s one of the reasons I’m so anal about Quality).
It's not firmware :) We use what is probably engineering functionality, built into the OS, to load and execute a file from disk. We run as a (mostly) normal program on the cam's normal OS.
By the way, rift valley software? I'm writing to you from Kenya, one of the homes of the great rift valley. It is truly remarkable to drive down the escarpment just North of Nairobi!
Yes! As a software developer in the photography space, we are deeply in need of projects like this.
The photography world is mired in proprietary software/ formats, and locked down hardware; and while it has always been true that a digital camera is “just” a computer, now more than ever it is painful just how limited and archaic on-board camera software is when compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to in the mobile phone era.
If I compare photography to another creative discipline I am somewhat familiar with, music production - the latter has way more open software/hardware initiatives, and freedom of not having to tether yourself to large, slow, user-abusing companies when choosing gear to work with.
An alternative to Magic Lantern is CHDK. Unfortunately that also feels somewhat abandoned and at the best of times held together with string* so I’m glad ML is back.
*No judgement, maintaining a niche and complex reverse-engineering project must be a thankless task
It is actually easier to get started now, as I spent several months updating the dev infrastructure so it all works on modern platforms with modern tooling.
Plus Ghidra exists now, which was a massive help for us.
We didn't really go on hiatus - the prior lead dev left the project, and the target hardware changed significantly. So everything slowed down. Now we are back to a more normal speed. Of course, we still need more devs; currently we have 3.
Readit News
> Magic Lantern is a free software add-on that runs from the SD/CF card and adds a host of new features to Canon EOS cameras that weren't included from the factory by Canon.
It also backports new features to old Canon cameras that aren't supported anymore, and is generally just a really impressive feat of both (1) reverse engineering and (2) keeping old hardware relevant and useful.
Today, cameras like Blackmagic and editing platforms like DaVinci handle RAW seamlessly, but it wasn't like this even a few years ago.
I think possibly someone thought it sounded a bit like firmware?
I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions.
Got a Canon DSLR or mirrorless and like a bit of software reverse engineering? Consider joining in; it's quite an approachable hardware target. No code obfuscation, just classic reversing. You can pick up a well supported cam for a little less than $100. Cams range from ARMv5te up to AArch64.
Is this situation still the same? (Apologies for the hazy details -- this was 5 years ago!)
Anyway, I can happily talk you through how to do it. Our discord is probably easiest, or you can ask on the forum. Discord is linked from the forum: https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/
Whatever code you had back then won't build without some updates. 4000D is a good target for ML, lots of features that could be added.
> I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions.
Well, you asked for it!
One question I've always wondered about the project is: what is the difference between a model that you can support, and a model you currently can't? Is there a hard line where ML future compatibility becomes a brick wall? Are there models where something about the hardware / firmware makes you go 'ooh, that's a good candidate! I bet we can get that one working next'?
Also, as someone from the outside looking in who would be down to spend $100 to see if this something I can do or am interested in, which (cheap) model would be the easiest to grab and load up as dev environment (or in a configuration that mimics what someone might do to work on a feature), and where can I find documentation on how to do that? Is there a compendium of knowledge about how these cameras work from a reverse-engineering angle, or does everyone cut their teeth on forum posts and official canon technical docs?
edit: Found the RE guide on the website, gonna take a look at this later tonight
Re what we can support - it's a reverse engineering project, we can support anything with enough time ;) The very newest cams have software changes that make enabling ML slightly harder for normal users, but don't make much difference from a developer perspective. I don't see any signs of Canon trying to lock out reverse engineers. Gaining access and doing a basic, ML GUI but no features port, is not hard when you have experience.
What we choose to support: I work on the cams that I have. And the cams that I have are whatever I find for cheap, so it's pretty random. Other devs have whatever priorities they have :)
The first cam I ported to was 200D, unsupported at the time. This took me a few months to get ML GUI working (with no features enabled), and I had significant help. Now I can get a new cam to that standard in a few days in most cases. All the cams are fairly similar for the core OS. It's the peripherals that change the most as hardware improves, so this takes the most time. And the newer the camera, the more the hw and sw has diverged from the best supported cams.
The cheapest way for you to get started is to use your 5D3 - which you can do in our fork of qemu. You can dump the roms (using software, no disassembly required), then emulate a full Canon and ML GUI, which can run your custom ML changes. There are limitations, mostly around emulation of peripherals. It's still very useful if you want to improve / customise the UI.
https://github.com/reticulatedpines/qemu-eos/tree/qemu-eos-v...
Re docs - they're not in a great shape. It's scattered over a few different wikis, a forum, and commit messages in multiple repos. Quick discussion happens on Discord. We're very responsive there, it's the best place for dev questions. The forum is the best single source for reference knowledge. From a developer perspective, I have made some efforts on a Dev Guide, but it's far from complete, e.g.:
https://github.com/reticulatedpines/magiclantern_simplified/...
If you want physical hardware to play with (it is more fun after all), you might be able to find a 650d or 700d for about $100. Anything that's Digic 5 green here is a capable target:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_EOS_digital_cam...
Digic 4 stuff is also easy to support, and will be cheaper, but it's less capable and will be showing its age generally - depends if that bothers you.
Thanks for your work keeping it going, and for those that have worked on it before.
Could this be a conflict with long exposures? Conceivably AF, too. The intervalometer will attempt to trigger capture every 5s wall time. If the combined time to AF seek, expose, and finish saving to card (etc) is >5s, you will skip a shot.
When the time comes, compare the price of a used 5d3 vs a shutter replacement on the 5d2, maybe you'll get a "free" upgrade :) Thanks for the kind words!
I am a hobbyist nature photographer and it helped me capture some incredible moments. Though I have a Canon R7, the Canon 5d3 is my favorite camera because I prefer the feel of DSLR optical viewfinders when viewing wildlife subjects, and I prefer certain Canon EF lenses.
More here:
https://amontalenti.com/photos
When I hang out with programmer friends and demo Magic Lantern to them, they are always blown away.
Please recruit your programmer friends to the cause :) The R7 is a target cam, but nobody has started work on it yet. There is some early work on the R5 and R6. I don't remember for the R7, but from the age and tier, this may be one of the new gen quad core AArch64.
I expect these modern cams to be powerful enough to run YOLO on cam, perhaps with sub 1s latency. Could be some fun things to do there.
It’s been a huge blessing!
I am a compiler dev with decent low level skills, anything in particular I should look at that would be good for the project as well as my ‘new’ 6D? (No experience with video unfortunately)
I have a newer R62 as well, but would rather not try anything with it yet.
I've had a fun idea knocking around for a while for astro. These cams have a fairly accessible serial port, hidden under the thumb grip rubber. I think the 6D may have one in the battery grip pins, too. We can sample LV data at any time, and do some tricks to boost exposure for "night vision". Soooo, you could turn the cam itself into a star tracker, which controlled a mount over serial. While doing the photo sequence. I bet you could do some very cool tricks with that. Bit involved for a first time project though :D
The 6D is a fairly well understood and supported cam, and your compiler background should really help you - so really the question is what would you like to add? I can then give a decent guess about how hard various things might be. I believe the 6D has integrated Wifi. We understand the network stack (surprisingly standard!) and a few demo things have been written, but nothing very useful so far. Maybe an auto image upload service? Would be cool to support something like OAuth, integrate with imgur etc?
It's slow work, but hopefully you don't mind that too much, compilers have a similar reputation.
(I literally only want a raw histogram)
(I also have a 1Dx2 but that's probably a harder port)
Thank you and the magic lantern team!
Heh, a little like saying "the main thing you need is to be able to play the violin, which is a small instrument with good tutorials".
Maaaaybe I'm hiding a tradeoff around complexity vs built-in features, but volunteers can work that out themselves later on.
You honestly don't need much knowledge of C to get started in some areas. The ML GUI is easy to modify if you stay within the lines. Other areas, e.g., porting a complex feature to a new camera, are much harder. But that's the life of a reverse engineer.
Very impressive! Thankless work. A reminder to myself to chase down some warnings in projects I am a part of...
I have an xcconfig file[0], that I add to all my projects, that turns on treat warnings as errors, and enables all warnings. In C, I used to compile -wall.
I also use SwiftLint[1].
But these days, I almost never trigger any warnings, because I’ve developed the habit of good coding.
Since Magic Lantern is firmware, I’m surprised that this was not already the case. Firmware needs to be as close to perfect as possible (I used to write firmware. It’s one of the reasons I’m so anal about Quality).
[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Checkbox/blob/main... (I need to switch the header to MIT license, to match the rest of the project. It’s been a long time, since I used GPL, but I’ve been using this file, forever).
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/swiftlint/
We build with: -Wall -Wextra -Werror-implicit-function-declaration -Wdouble-promotion -Winline -Wundef -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-unused-function -Wno-format
Warnings are treated as errors for release builds.
By the way, rift valley software? I'm writing to you from Kenya, one of the homes of the great rift valley. It is truly remarkable to drive down the escarpment just North of Nairobi!
The photography world is mired in proprietary software/ formats, and locked down hardware; and while it has always been true that a digital camera is “just” a computer, now more than ever it is painful just how limited and archaic on-board camera software is when compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to in the mobile phone era.
If I compare photography to another creative discipline I am somewhat familiar with, music production - the latter has way more open software/hardware initiatives, and freedom of not having to tether yourself to large, slow, user-abusing companies when choosing gear to work with.
Long live Magic Lantern!
cries in .x3f & Sigma Photo Pro
> git clone https://github.com/reticulatedpines/magiclantern_simplified
*No judgement, maintaining a niche and complex reverse-engineering project must be a thankless task
https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK
One of those projects I wanted to take on but always back logged. Wild that they've been on a 5 year hiatus -- https://www.newsshooter.com/2025/06/21/the-genie-is-out-of-t... -- that's the not-so-happy side of cool free wares.
It is actually easier to get started now, as I spent several months updating the dev infrastructure so it all works on modern platforms with modern tooling.
Plus Ghidra exists now, which was a massive help for us.
We didn't really go on hiatus - the prior lead dev left the project, and the target hardware changed significantly. So everything slowed down. Now we are back to a more normal speed. Of course, we still need more devs; currently we have 3.