A129 Pro firmware

[Rhody401]

I am not experiencing any problems with the newest build of the Beta. The picture quality is fantastic and it has been rock solid reliable.

With the previous Beta, I was having problems any time I turned the Wi-Fi on with lockups and I was unable to program it from the phone. That problem has since gone away.

I still have the original a129 duo GPS on windshield, which I assume has been improved? Also using the a129 duo hw kit from December. Is the new he kit identical in output?

My only concern is that the unit does seem to run pretty warm even when in a parked cool garage overnight the screen is hot to the touch in the morning. Wifi is off, wired from hwk direct to unit, auto parking mode on.



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[Nigel]

I still have the original a129 duo GPS on windshield, which I assume has been improved?

It has been improved so that it can pass the parking mode signal from the h/w kit through to the camera, so that you can plug the cable into the mount instead of having to plug it directly into the camera. That improvement was done for the A129 Duo before the release of the A129 Pro though. I think it has also had a more recent upgrade to the quality of the cable specifically for the A129 Pro.

Is the new he kit identical in output?

The old kit will probably work OK with the new A129 Pro, however there may be a high pitched squeal on the audio which some people may dislike. I think it is also possible that the rear camera may have difficulty with the oldest h/w kits.

My only concern is that the unit does seem to run pretty warm even when in a parked cool garage overnight...

It is designed to get very warm, this shouldn't be a concern. When "parked cool garage overnight", there is very little air movement over the camera to take the heat away, when parked in sunshine there is air movement created by convection within the car so the cooling is rather more successful! The only real issue with it getting very warm is that it is clearly using more power than the A129 Duo, so your parking mode battery timespan will be significantly less, although since yours is still running in the morning, maybe it is not very significant.

 

[evad]

I was reviewing A129 PRO DUAL (build 20190920) footage this morning and found that several blocks of me driving around were not recorded. I remember driving in the evening before yesterday - no footage recorded on memory card from that drive, while earlier recordings were saved just fine. Today's morning drive with kids to school was also missing. I don't recall any worrying audible signals coming from the camera during that time. I don't use parking mode (camera turns on/off with the ignition). Rear cam is connected. The card was VIOFO MLC 64GB, however I'm switching to Toshiba 256GB card today. This is strange, I am going to look into that closer in coming few days.

 

[Nigel]

I was reviewing A129 PRO DUAL (build 20190920) footage this morning and found that several blocks of me driving around were not recorded. I remember driving in the evening before yesterday - no footage recorded on memory card from that drive, while earlier recordings were saved just fine. Today's morning drive with kids to school was also missing. I don't recall any worrying audible signals coming from the camera during that time. I don't use parking mode (camera turns on/off with the ignition). Rear cam is connected. The card was VIOFO MLC 64GB, however I'm switching to Toshiba 256GB card today. This is strange, I am going to look into that closer in coming few days.

I suggest you format the new memory card in the camera before recording on it...

 

[TonyM]

I don't recall any worrying audible signals coming from the camera during that time.

I don't usually have beeps turned on, but I will turn them on now for troubleshooting

 

[reverend]

I wonder if that's the same problem with missing footage I saw back on the 21st September with an earlier firmware version - the starts of trips were missing and eventually if driven long enough it would just have footage from the middle of the trip.

I haven't been out in the car at all hardly this week as been busy working from home so it's mainly been off due to voltage, I'm glad it's not just me now who's seen that with missing footage and potentially rules out the Sandisk card causing that issue now it's been seen with @viofo cards.

Silly question now but I have seen some erroneous GPS location data at times (ie one of the positions changes massively then returns to normal which I put down to driving through covered locations here), complete theory here but wondering if maybe a bad time signal is being passed to the camera which can then cause the wrong files to be deleted by accident (ie at cycle time delete files newer than current time).

Are you both running with GPS mounts when you've had the missing video issue? If not the time theory is blown out of the water!

 

[TonyM]

An incorrect time signal would not explain why my Pro was recording the rear camera but not the front one.

Could a damaged rear camera cable do that? If anything, I would expect the opposite with only the front being recorded.

 

[BCHobbyist]

It would be very helpful for Viofo to use 3 digit version numbers for all new releases.
What is the full version for firmware 20190924 v1.0 displayed when viewing the Menu Version - - - - - v1.05 ???

 

[reverend]

An incorrect time signal would not explain why my Pro was recording the rear camera but not the front one.

Could a damaged rear camera cable do that? If anything, I would expect the opposite with only the front being recorded.

Sorry Tony, that certainly is a strange one and have to hold my hands up there no idea for that black video one and was thinking of the missing files being reported. I've got to admit I don't have enough milage on 0920 to know if mine does similar but have a good few hundred miles to cover this weekend so hopefully will get more time with it.

Does it always come back ok after a full cold reboot? Have you had it apart to see if the ribbon cable is fully locked in? To be fair if it's just firmware 0920 it does suggests a problem with this one - I'll get some milage racked up over the weekend and see how it fares here.

I know the option for the screensaver is currently gone, but I have to admit when I ran the Mini0906 in my previous car I always had the screen on as it made it a very quick visual check to see if it was working. Technically yes you can get done for it but I did 20k like that with no issues from the police although it did probably help the screen was tiny on that.

Have you guys seen much in the way of hot pixels at night btw (stuck on white)?

I noticed in a trip from 10 days ago they seemed to increase after an hour or so of driving (about 20 or so) but then dropped again as I'd turned the temperature down in the car two degrees (from 20c to 18c) for the last 30 minutes and they pretty much all disappeared. I guess mapping out hot pixels on a 4k sensor is never going to be perfect and in all fairness they only showed up on the TV at full native res and not on the laptop screens. Just wanted to check if that's what you're all seeing.

@viofo if there are any firmware updates due imminently? I've got seven hours or so of driving to get through tomorrow so it should be a good test if so - if not I'll just stick with 0920. I think I saw that the cameras are heading to retail customers now so guessing that's with the August version maybe?

 

[jokiin]

China is on holidays at the moment, you wouldn't see anything until later next week at best

 

[reverend]

China is on holidays at the moment, you wouldn't see anything until later next week at best

Oh wow Golden Week already, it still feels like I'm in March! Happy holidays @viofo in that case!

 

[TonyM]

Does it always come back ok after a full cold reboot? Have you had it apart to see if the ribbon cable is fully locked in?

Yes, it's always fine after a cold reboot.

I have not yet checked inside for a loose connection.

To answer your earlier question, i have the Pro setup with HK3 into the GPS mount.

 

[reverend]

I've just been out for a drive to the shops and something is definitely off with 0916 onwards in prebuffered parking mode, although mine is behaving slightly differently - look at these parking files:



There are two rear pre-buffered parking files which aren't playable - the two white icons with the Quicktime logo. VLC won't play them either nor will MediaInfo parse them.

I'll get some over to Viofo for the engineers - the corrupt files do seem to have data in them but something has corrupted them (maybe something has overwritten part of the prebuffer memory by the time it dumps it to card - again just a theory it could be one of many things).

I've got video on the 400GB card back to the 20th September when I was on the previous version 0916 and there are similar corruptions present in parking mode files from 0916 and 0920 (I wiped data previous to that). It seems to randomly affect front and back.

I've fired up files in Hex editors for a nosey, and it looks like something is corrupting the data as the headers look very similar and there is similar data at the end of the file with the GPS info in.



That's a good playable file on the left, and a file that VLC, MediaInfo and Quicktime won't touch on the right.

One for the engineers to decide whether it's a code thing at their side, or at the Novatek SDK side.

 

[TonyM]

Looks like your camera tried to combine 064402PR and 064734PR into a single file?

 

[reverend]

For that top one yes, a lot of the others were similar sizes to normal clips in line with what you'd expect.

I'll try carving it the big one up later to see if the routine got confused and dumped two lots of videos into one filename.

Certainly a strange one but hopefully something easy to fix.

I did see something similar and just ignored it last time as a one off as I didn't have much on the card - it's certainly easier to spot a problem on the bigger cards as you have so much more data [emoji106]

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[CaptureYourAction]

For that top one yes, a lot of the others were similar sizes to normal clips in line with what you'd expect.

I'll try carving it the big one up later to see if the routine got confused and dumped two lots of videos into one filename.

Certainly a strange one but hopefully something easy to fix.

I did see something similar and just ignored it last time as a one off as I didn't have much on the card - it's certainly easier to spot a problem on the bigger cards as you have so much more data [emoji106]

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Are you still using the 400GB card?

 

[Mtz]

Do you have Wi-Fi on?

enjoy,
Mtz

 

[TonyM]

Do you have Wi-Fi on?

enjoy,
Mtz

I don't enable WiFi on mine

 

[Mtz]

Sorry, I was asking @reverend

enjoy,
Mtz

 

[reverend]

Sorry, I was asking @reverend

enjoy,
Mtz

Hi @Mtz, how are you?

No Wifi - I've got to admit I'm still of the old school mindset and would rather take the card out of the camera as it's usually quicker for what I want to review. I'll save the Wifi testing for a day the wife is moaning at me

It is still the 400GB card, but if I was going to see issues I'd expect to see them when driving with the bitrate turned up to the maximum. I can do 100 miles and no problems seen with corruption when it's writing 570MB per minute, yet it switches to parking mode writing out 100MB per 45 seconds and can randomly get issues.

I'm just looking again now and all the files with issues are showing as truncated in MediaInfo.



I've just been spinning the data various ways and actually I'm seeing the front camera in parking mode can happily burst the bitrate up when there's a lot of activity - these are all front parking mode files larger than the rest (and they're valid for the most part too - ignore the icons in this screenshot as Finder hasn't done thumbnails in this filtered view):



You can't actually see it but that file is CBR not VBR so it's burst the bitrate up.

I wonder if the pre-buffer parking mode records in high bitrate all the time and then re-encodes the motion part - I'd say 99% of my front parking mode files are around 10Mbps but that one is over 20.

Now when I look at the rear parking mode footage there are only 3 abnormally sized files and they're all corrupted - the rear definitely doesn't jump up in size like the front can.



One more thing of interest to notice though is that the three rear corrupt files there don't have the read only attribute set which is normally toggled on for parking mode files. The front files when corrupt do have the read only flag set as expected.

Unfortunately other corrupt files do have that attribute set, so maybe the large corrupt rear parking mode file with no read only attribute set is a sign there's a small logic error in the code somewhere?

I think I'll reflash to 0916 firmware and reset to defaults and leave bitrate settings alone and see how things go then for the weekend and I'll try and dig out another card for testing.