GoPro Files
When you record videos with a GoPro camera, you will end up with at least these 3 types of files:
But what are these?
*.THM are thumbnail files. These thumbnails are used in the GoPro gallery of created videos.
*.LRV are Low Resolution Videos, this is used by GoPro itself to play videos on its small screen for which you don’t need high resolution and high quality videos. If I use ffprobe, I can see these two streams for video and audio:
Stream #0:0[0x1](eng): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuvj420p(pc, bt709, progressive), 768x432 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 4292 kb/s, 59.94 fps, 59.94 tbr, 60k tbn (default)
Stream #0:1[0x2](eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 190 kb/s (default)As you can see, not much quality, but certainly enough for the small GoPro screen.
*.MP4 are the actual high quality videos that you want to use later on. The parameters of the streams in the container obviously depend on your setting. The codec with which GoPro encodes these videos can be either h.264 or its successor h.265.
I also mentioned there can be more files per a video. You can also choose to record raw audio. GoPro then creates a separate audio file.
So here you go, if you use a GoPro camera for the first time and are a bit confused about these files that the camera creates, here is an explanation. If you want to copy your actual high quality videos, you can just copy the *.MP4files and ignore the rest.
