Tweaking my good old Samsung Galaxy S2 to make its camera SILENT !

Though I'm in love with computer stuff since I was 13, and work as a professional in IT since 1993, I've always been deliberately slow to adopt new technologies. You'll never see me take a camp in front of an Apple store days before their very last device is sold :)

Anyway I bought my first and actually still my only smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy SII, in late 2012.
I am still very happy with it, but recently I had the need to take pictures silently : I wanted to shoot a newborn who was falling asleep. I was almost sure that the camera shutter sound would have awaken him, and incidentally make his mother to go crazy on me.

At this exact moment I discovered that there was no option to make it silent; no matter I muted the phone, taking a picture would whir loudly its awful mimic of a mechanical camera.

I then started to trim the internet, assuming it was already handled by some google play app... I tried several, without much luck. After a couple of evenings trying this and that, I dropped it.

Until recently, when I had another need, leading me to root my device (very easily with KingoRoot).
It came to my mind this annoying shutter sound and I fiddled a bit around this solutions :

• http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s2/themes-apps/howto-disable-camera-sound-fix-battery-t1079136
• http://www.reviewtechnica.com/2013/04/how-to-silence-or-mute-camera-sounds-on.html
• http://www.reviewtechnica.com/2013/10/mute-gs2-camcorder-sounds.html

None of them worked for me, but it gave my the idea to search xml files containing the sequence "ShutterSound" (with the excellent TotalCommander) and bingo ! I found it in the file /system/csc/customer.xml :

[...]
<multimedia>
  <camera>
    <shuttersound>on</shuttersound>
  </camera>
</multimedia>
[...]

I changed "on" to "off", saved it with TotalCommander, rebooted my device and Tadaaaam ! The camera is now totally silent :)

Hope it helps !