The fact that USB ptp is some baseline is kind of exceedingly great, even if yeah in practice it'a a huge mess of vendor extensions tacked on. I like trying to have some collaboration & specs! It's a monster oh sure but gphoto2 probably wouldn't have come about, as a sick compendium of all camera backs & vendor extensions, if there wasn't a common thread, common binding for cameras! Once you go from USB to IP you're (generally) untethered unmoored from anything shared!

What's done here is super admirable & super neat. But it's even more spelunking into the unknown than USB ptp imo! Thankfully there's some pretty old school direct on-the-line protocols that are kinda just working!

It's interesting to me at least to navel gaze over. The attempt to have common tools versus the just doing whatever.

One of my favorite connectivity solutions ever was the Nvidia Shield Controller (2015). A wifi (wifi direct/wifi-p2p at that!) video gaming controller. With audio that uses ozproto's stack, a usb-over-ip setup! Something about just tunneling USB being conceptually easier to reason about & do than deciding what IP services to make for a controller is so elegant and neat and weird. https://github.com/devmapal/nvidia-shield-controller-driver

When reverse-engineering some of the Samsung NX camera firmware files, I found USB-PTP code that implements different custom remote commands <https://chaos.social/@ge0rg/114723076401717110> but I'm not deep enough into PTP to make sense of them.

Is there anywhere a group focusing on understanding and re-implementing custom PTP protocols?