Dashcam settings to write at lowest bitrate

[j miller]

I just got an Actioncam as a dashcam, and so far so good. I started out at 1080p, 15fps, standard data rate, wide FOV, MOV format. It looks pretty good, but license plates of vehicles in the opposite direction are not decipherable, and vehicles ahead of me 3-4 car lengths are barely decipherable.

Has anyone spent considerable time playing with the settings to improve this? Turning everything up to max is one obvious way, but I'd like to lower the data rate as much as possible while maintaining good enough quality.

As with most things, there's likely a point where increasing the rate of SD card writes does very little to improve the video quality. I also read somewhere that turning Sharpness to min and setting White Balance to Cloudy improved things; any advice/experience with the Advanced settings for dashcam use?

 

[Nigel]

What action cam is it?

I would start by increasing the frame rate to 30fps, at 15fps the chances of catching a plate coming the opposite direction at the right distance to be readable is considerably reduced. Doubling the frame rate does not need to double the bitrate since there is still the same amount of movement and it is the mainly movement that is being encoded, if there is too much movement between frames then the compression performs becomes inefficient.

 

[j miller]

What action cam is it?

I would start by increasing the frame rate to 30fps, at 15fps the chances of catching a plate coming the opposite direction at the right distance to be readable is considerably reduced. Doubling the frame rate does not need to double the bitrate since there is still the same amount of movement and it is the mainly movement that is being encoded, if there is too much movement between frames then the compression performs becomes inefficient.

It's this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/221259368601
I thought ActionCam was the model. Anyway, good point about the framerate. I sort of was aware of this but didn't think about it as I was setting it up. Right now I'm seeing about 1 MB/second.

 

[Nigel]

It's this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/221259368601
I thought ActionCam was the model. Anyway, good point about the framerate. I sort of was aware of this but didn't think about it as I was setting it up. Right now I'm seeing about 1 MB/second.

Ahh, we normally just call that a "Mobius", or sometimes "Mobius 1".
There are plenty of threads on here about that model that you could read.

At this time of year your best bet for significantly better quality is to move to the southern hemisphere where it is summer with bright sunlight!

 

[j miller]

At this time of year your best bet for significantly better quality is to move to the southern hemisphere where it is summer with bright sunlight!

How much extra would that cost over the camera? Ha ha, joking.

I did look through a few forum pages, but maybe I need to look harder. Thanks for the info.