Update August 2019

A reader dropped me a line to say this doesn’t to work for him, some time went by but I finally got round to looking into this, and surprise! I found it no longer worked for me either :(

So I had a poke around and I’ve found a new ffmpeg command which seems to work for me. I’ve updated the command shown below.

Original Post

I’ve been using our GoPro quite a bit this summer which the kids have really enjoyed. I also recently got myself a DJI Spark, which is also great fun.

However I really wanted to be able to import the Spark videos into the new GoPro Quik desktop app because it makes short work of turning a load of clips into short snappy videos.  Sadly it only offers to import videos originating from the GoPro.

I figured there are only so many ways the software can check to determine if a given file was made by a GoPro or not, so I got to poking around and after about half an hour I found a solution which works on all my current DJI video files.

If you run this ffmpeg command on any a DJI video (although it probably works for iPhone or other videos), it adds the magic field that Quik looks for, and then it happily imports the video.

ffmpeg -i dji-video.mp4 \
       -map_metadata \
       -1 \
       -codec copy \
       -metadata:s handler="GoPro AVC encoder" \
       -metadata:s handler_name=" GoPro AVC" \
       gopro-video.mp4

I know almost nothing about the millions of options ffmpeg accepts, so this is mostly copy and paste from various google searches, but it works fine from what I can tell!