Can not get correct time with GPS (no GPS is ok)

[acrowau]

Howdy all,
I purchased 2 x 0803's (1 with GPS and the other without) for the one vehicle (front and rear).
Purchased from Foxoffer back in October and only just getting around to putting them in car.
Overall, so far, seems pretty good and a little trial and error, and image quality is very good.

One unit though does not hold battery charge, has a little bit of a 'dickie' top button and when connecting to a PC it can display "USB connecting" - but doesn't connect showing the screen (this random though).

But the one thing I can't get right is the time with GPS. (The rear dash cam without GPS is ok).

The 1 hour increments would normally be ok, but I need a half hour increment for my location.
I'm in South Australia and the 'time' is needed as +9 1/2 hours (but no 1/2 is available) so my time stamp is incorrect.
I have tried putting in 00 and the time but the GPS changes it all.
Any thoughts on how to overcome this?
Thanks.

 

[jokiin]

needs a firmware update to address this, none of these 080x models currently support half hour offsets, you need 9.5 and 10.5 for DST

 

[acrowau]

Thanks for the quick reply jokiin.
ok, but the version shown in the unit seems to be the current firmware (20140826 v1.0) for GPS + 1 card.
Re-put it in maybe ?

 

[jokiin]

they don't support this, they'd need to change it in the firmware, we do half hour offsets in our products as we sell in Australia, have to have it

 

[acrowau]

oh sorry, see what you mean now.
Suppose will have to wait until upgraded firmware done.
Thanks for your advice.

 

[jokiin]

yeah unfortunately SA gets overlooked by just about every supplier, most don't have this

 

[reverend]

India have the same problem I think - they're 5.5 hours ahead of GMT right now.

 

[jokiin]

India have the same problem I think - they're 5.5 hours ahead of GMT right now.

yeah we support that one as well, the SDK doesn't have support for these already so it all had to be done on our side, we do +13 for New Zealand DST as well, if you sell something in a market it's logical to have it suit the local need

 

[acrowau]

Yeah, well I'm sure there would be a number of places that have the same 'problem'.
Maybe the manufacturer should grasp this issue and be one extra step ahead of their competition.

 

[jokiin]

Yeah, well I'm sure there would be a number of places that have the same 'problem'.
Maybe the manufacturer should grasp this issue and be one extra step ahead of their competition.

they pretty much do whatever the wholesale buyer requests and nothing more, without any decent quantity being sold or a wholesale buyer located in that specific market it never gets a look in

 

[reverend]

Maybe it would be easier for the coders to do GMT changes in 0.5 hour increments up to whatever the maximum is - that way every possibility would be covered until some clever PM decides to change by 15 minutes

 

[acrowau]

Exactly reverend, it shouldn't be too hard for them - surely.
And it would keep a lot of us happier to get correct timings.
You never know when this 'exact' time might help (e.g. in court or insurances etc) after all, isn't that what these are partly designed for !!

 

[jokiin]

Maybe it would be easier for the coders to do GMT changes in 0.5 hour increments up to whatever the maximum is - that way every possibility would be covered until some clever PM decides to change by 15 minutes [emoji14]

Don't laugh, there are a couple of 15 minute offset zones already, out of the way places though, supporting the offset and auto updating the time is more complex than you might expect which I guess is why so many don't do it

 

[reverend]

Well I never knew that - Nepal and Newfoundland are off by 45 minutes!

You really do learn something every day - that's a very strange offset for sure!!

So taking that into account from a programmers perspective they could be lazy and make it changeable by 15 minutes but I guess that then opens a can of worms of people who get the offset wrong and then complain it's wrong afterwards - you really can't win in that situation.

I did read an interesting story about NTP yesterday which pretty much everything in IT uses for it's time - it's currently maintained by just a couple of people and one of them has been doing a lot of the funding himself. He's at the point where big business isn't giving them enough (read 0) money other than a couple of companies like VMware so he's thinking about giving it up and getting a full time job.

If he walks that's potentially going to cause carnage - all it would need would be for a few big companies to pay him a wage and there would be no issue for now.

 

[Nigel]

Would be easier to set all dashcams to UTC (+0) and give Registrator Viewer an option to offset the recorded time by the local time offset so that it displays the times correctly. (The local time offset is already configured and maintained on computers so it just needs an on/off tick box option)

 

[jokiin]

Would be easier to set all dashcams to UTC (+0) and give Registrator Viewer an option to offset the recorded time by the local time offset so that it displays the times correctly. (The local time offset is already configured and maintained on computers so it just needs an on/off tick box option)

Registrator Viewer supports this already and that's the option for people in unsupported timezones, it does mean they can't datestamp their videos and the file timestamps will always be off, not so good if you're wanting to use your files for any kind of evidence purposes

 

[Nigel]

Registrator Viewer supports this already and that's the option for people in unsupported timezones, it does mean they can't datestamp their videos and the file timestamps will always be off, not so good if you're wanting to use your files for any kind of evidence purposes

Give Registrator Viewer an option to date stamp the videos with the correct date and time? Thinking about it, it could probably do that quite easily without having to re-encode the video and loose quality - maybe worth suggesting to the author...

I can't see use of UTC being an issue for use as evidence, running your dashcam on +0 is a reasonably thing to do and the minute and second will still be accurate (assuming you have GPS).

Actually, I do run my dashcams on +0 and don't bother with a summer time correction.

 

[reverend]

The minutes would be wrong for all those with the +30 or +45 minute timezones though mate.

A lot of people don't use RV either - @jokiin is right when he says this problem is a bit of a nightmare from an engineering point of view!

 

[jokiin]

RV has an option to apply an offset or even use the computer offset which can correct how the files are displayed, doesn't change the fact that the files themselves will be incorrectly labled though

the correct way is to do it in the camera, not everyone can do this but I guess that's part of the reason why some cameras are of a higher standard than others

 

[Nigel]

the correct way is to do it in the camera, not everyone can do this but I guess that's part of the reason why some cameras are of a higher standard than others

That is never going to work well if you commute across a time zone border, if all memory card files were always in UTC then they would always be right and you could always view them in the right way for the place you are viewing from.