Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong but, I remember reading Viofo discontinued H.265 across all dash cams.I noticed that for 4k30 the A139 Pro uses AVC or h.264. Is there a setting for h.265 / HEVC? I’m unable to find such an option in the VIOFO app.
I'm not aware of any direct or secret button press procedure to enable HEVC H.265 with the A139 Pro. My older A129 Pro Duo has that feature - at least in the very old firmware that it's running.Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong but, I remember reading Viofo discontinued H.265 across all dash cams.
I think they went as far to remove the "secret hidden" function by long pressing a button on the dash cam itself with firmware updates.
@rcg530 Maybe Robert knows better.
-Chuck
I disagree 100%. lolI believe HEVC / H.265 is very mainstream now - most devices can play them back with hardware acceleration
For dashcam video there is little difference between the two in terms of quality given the same bitrate.It would be great if HEVC support can be added back as it allows for low bitrates while maintaining high quality.
The AV1 codec is of course free of license fees, but you still need the codec and hardware to cope with real time encoding, so the cost is not zero. Hopefully it will arrive soon, but I wouldn't delay buying a camera in the hope that it will arrive soon! It is a better codec for driving video, but only if the codec can manage to produce good quality in real time, and I don't think any hardware is currently capable of that challenge for dashcam video.In terms of "new, improved" codecs - AV1 is quite new - nice to have, but not necessary.
This is new to me - is there a citation or article I can read up that discusses this in detail?HEVC works well when most of the scene is not moving, and reasonably well when the scene is moving very slowly, once you get up to driving speeds the extra optimisations to reduce bitrate do not work and it works almost identically to H264.
Yep, I’m running H.265 on my A139 Pro and can confirm it works. You activate it the same way as all the other Viofo’s with stopping recording and then holding the Mic button for several seconds.As i recall the cameras that use to have the option to switch between H.264 and H.265, you did so by long pressing the MIC button.
Would be an interesting heat and power comparison if anyone is so inclined.Yep, I’m running H.265 on my A139 Pro and cam confirm it works. You activate it the same way as all the other Viofo’s with stopping recording and then holding the Mic button for several seconds.
I accept your challenge. lolWould be an interesting heat and power comparison if anyone is so inclined.
There is plenty written on the optimisations new to H265 over H264, but nothing that I know of which relates these to dashcams.This is new to me - is there a citation or article I can read up that discusses this in detail?
Don't think I ever saw that article.I remember reading an article that they removed H.265 support to reduce the possibility of overheating the camera, and therefor sudden stops in recording to cool down. The risk of overheating seems to outweigh any gain in video quality because for a dash cam you want it reliably recording the entire time. The benefit of smaller files was deemed irrelevant because this is not used as a streaming device, and users could just simply buy a larger memory card for the H.264 format files.
The article claimed that other dashcam manufactures that offer H.265 are considering going back to H.264 for theses same reasons.
I can't find the article right now.
Hold the phone Lothar.I use it for the improvement in image quality (30% improvement in video quality over H.264
It can be either.Hold the phone Lothar.
Are you telling me H.265 improves image quality?
I thought the only reason H.265 existed was for smaller file sizes, (data compression).
-Chuck
You forgot the image quality measurement!At the request of @CuriousGeorge I compared H.264 vs H.265 on the A139 Pro in relation to power consumption, heat, and file size.
I'm not sure what a 30% increase in video quality looks like. Is it something you would notice?If your camera is capable of recording at 30Mbps H.265, then that means you have a 30% increase in video quality which is equivalent to 43Mbps H.264 (while using the same file size)