[JD6]

Having no previous experience of dashcams, I wondered about the format of video files from popular dashcams, Blackvue and Thinkware in particular.

I have tried out BMW's Advanced Car Eye 2.0 (the new model) and that produces a single AVI file every minute which contains both front and rear video footage. You have to use something like VLC Media Player in order to see the rear footage (on track 2). If you use Windows Media Player, that only shows the front camera footage.

There is an app which goes with this dashcam, but while it can download the footage from the dashcam to your phone, there appears to be no means of exporting the footage from the app.

The problem I could see with this is if you are required to produce rear camera footage for the insurance company or perhaps the police, they won't actually be able to play it unless they install VLC Media Player.

Do Blackvue / Thinkware have the same issue - i.e. do they produce a single file containing both front and rear footage, which needs some special software to view, or can the files be easily separated? Do they all break it down into 1 minute chunks?

In addition the BMW dashcam claims to be 60 FPS, yet if you want to record front and rear, which everyone will, it will only record at 30 FPS. Is that the same for the other models which can do 60 FPS?

[aquazi]

My thinkware (f800pro) has a file per recording, so front and rear are on separate mp4’s.

File names has an F at the end for front and R for rear... but tbh i tend to just pair it to the wifi and download it that way then browsing the sd card.

Never checked the fps, but i’d image it will be 30fps per stream - as thats the max i can set it as in the app.

[JD6]

Originally Posted by aquazi

My thinkware (f800pro) has a file per recording, so front and rear are on separate mp4’s.

File names has an F at the end for front and R for rear... but tbh i tend to just pair it to the wifi and download it that way then browsing the sd card.

Never checked the fps, but i’d image it will be 30fps per stream - as thats the max i can set it as in the app.

Good to know. I think separate mp4 files sounds a more sensible approach.