PSA: Check your dashcam regularly!

[Gibson99]

I was in a minor fender-bender tonight (someone changed lanes into me without looking). When I got home to retrieve the footage, at first, I couldn't find it! The newest files on the camera were 3 days old! Well great, I'm screwed if this guy tries to say I hit him. Then I noticed several files in the EVENT folder that were dated January 2018. Turns out the battery in my dashcam failed, and it had reset itself to defaults. At least it was still recording, and thankfully the battery hadn't exploded or caught fire!


That was a couple hours ago, not a couple YEARS ago like the timestamp says!

One other thing i noticed that was abnormal - when i unplugged the dashcam to take it inside and get the footage onto my PC, the screen immediately turned off instead of waiting a few seconds and then showing the Vantrue logo and playing the shutdown sound - another sign that the internal battery has died. I'll see if I can hack together some way to convert this camera to use capacitors instead of a LiPo, but not holding my breath. Till then I'll put ye olde @viofo A118C back in the car just to have a camera i don't need to worry about.

 

[kamkar]

Cant be said often enough, you need to pay attention to your camera / cameras, and use those 5 - 10 minutes now and then, it can literally be the difference between failure and success.

 

[lacibaci]

My weekly workflow is to dump everything from my 256GB card to a hard drive and replace the card with another one (I have two identical 256GB Sandisk hi endurance)
256GB is plenty even for parked recording, and 1TB hard drive gives me about a month worth of data to archive.

 

[lacibaci]

I was in a minor fender-bender tonight (someone changed lanes into me without looking). When I got home to retrieve the footage, at first, I couldn't find it! The newest files on the camera were 3 days old! Well great, I'm screwed if this guy tries to say I hit him. Then I noticed several files in the EVENT folder that were dated January 2018. Turns out the battery in my dashcam failed, and it had reset itself to defaults. At least it was still recording, and thankfully the battery hadn't exploded or caught fire!

View attachment 49954
That was a couple hours ago, not a couple YEARS ago like the timestamp says!

One other thing i noticed that was abnormal - when i unplugged the dashcam to take it inside and get the footage onto my PC, the screen immediately turned off instead of waiting a few seconds and then showing the Vantrue logo and playing the shutdown sound - another sign that the internal battery has died. I'll see if I can hack together some way to convert this camera to use capacitors instead of a LiPo, but not holding my breath. Till then I'll put ye olde @viofo A118C back in the car just to have a camera i don't need to worry about.

Sounds like a buggy software. The camera should set its date/time from GPS...

 

[Gibson99]

Sounds like a buggy software. The camera should set its date/time from GPS...

i agree. it's a Vantrue N2 pro i got a little over a year ago, and i've never updated the firmware. will have to check if there's newer (dunno what version it has right now).

 

[jokiin]

Sounds like a buggy software. The camera should set its date/time from GPS...

it's not something they do by default in the SDK, something that has to be coded

 

[joe384]

Also remember to check the lenses every now and then to make sure they have not be knocked up or down (for cameras with no display or rear cams in a 2ch system)

 

[Nigel]

The lesson to be learned:

If you are buying a new dashcam, don't buy one with a battery!​

The battery normally dies just after the warranty has expired!​

Super capacitor dashcams normally just keep going.​

 

[DT MI]

My weekly workflow is to dump everything from my 256GB card to a hard drive and replace the card with another one (I have two identical 256GB Sandisk hi endurance)
256GB is plenty even for parked recording, and 1TB hard drive gives me about a month worth of data to archive.

Pretty much what I do - except I have a 5TB and 8TB drive for the video archives.

Why 13TB?

1. First, because I can - both drives were purchased back when I was getting interested in video editing (a passing fancy) and thought I would need the space.
2. Second, I find it useful when tracking hardware/firmware problems to have a lot of historical data to find patterns. It's proved quite useful over the years when something is happening intermittently. It's become a habit so no big deal to keep doing it.

 

[kamkar]

Hehe yeah video to eat up space, i have still to try using a LUT in my software.

#2 i agree, i cant tell how many times i have regretted not having some older footage at hand, but now in my new machine i have a 4TB drive so i dont have to delete as much as i use to.
I also think i will be picking up one more large spinning disk, but that will not happen before late next year at best, got some more hardware to buy first before i push add to basket on that one.

My GFX cooler arrived yesterday, but it go strait to a shelf to sit there for 5 - 6 months or more.

 

[Dashmellow]

The lesson to be learned:

If you are buying a new dashcam, don't buy one with a battery!​

The battery normally dies just after the warranty has expired!​

Super capacitor dashcams normally just keep going.​

Well, well, glad to see that you've finally, at long last, come to your senses about the merits of super-capacitors in dash cams. I recall how, shortly after you became a member here on DCT you spent a lot of time and effort questioning and arguing about how super-capacitors were likely no better than lithium-polymer batteries in dash cams, trying to make the case that super-capacitors might fail after as little as 41 days due to heat. You even claimed that the use of super-capacitors used at the time in higher end cameras were simply a justification to charge more money!

"That is just 41 days of use if you use it at it's maximum operating temperature of 85 degrees C which as far as I know is fairly typical for a supercap. Lasts a lot longer at lower temperatures.
Are supercaps proven to last longer than batteries at high temperature?"

"That is because they can justify charging more money because they are obviously superior.
But the evidence to support a super capacitor being superior is a bit hard to find! It is true that some cameras eat batteries in hot weather, but would they also eat super capacitors?"

 

[Gibson99]

the funny thing is, i still have my original battery-based A118, and as far as i know, it's still fine. granted, i haven't used it in over a year, but it gave me at least 2 years of completely uneventful service before i replaced it with the A119... including capturing a crash i was involved in. it's in a desk drawer now, but since this N2 is down till i get time to repair it, i'll probably put it back into service as my rear camera again, since the A119s i own are now in my wife's car.

 

[Dashmellow]

the funny thing is, i still have my original battery-based A118, and as far as i know, it's still fine. granted, i haven't used it in over a year, but it gave me at least 2 years of completely uneventful service before i replaced it with the A119... including capturing a crash i was involved in. it's in a desk drawer now, but since this N2 is down till i get time to repair it, i'll probably put it back into service as my rear camera again, since the A119s i own are now in my wife's car.

I still have an old DR32 dash cam that has been in a drawer for years. The camera dates back to 2013. It is a battery operated dash cam that survived at least two hot summers and two bitter cold sub zero winters out in my truck. This was long before I learned that lithium-ion batteries shouldn't be charged while frozen. Recently, I came across the cam in a drawer and decided to test it out and it still works and the battery still has enough juice to perform a proper shutdown and save the last file. I should really open the thing up and see if the battery is swollen.

 

[Nigel]

the funny thing is, i still have my original battery-based A118, and as far as i know, it's still fine. granted, i haven't used it in over a year, but it gave me at least 2 years of completely uneventful service before i replaced it with the A119... including capturing a crash i was involved in. it's in a desk drawer now, but since this N2 is down till i get time to repair it, i'll probably put it back into service as my rear camera again, since the A119s i own are now in my wife's car.

Lithium batteries are fine if you only charge them between 5 and 45 degrees C, should have a life of 15 years. However most dashcams don't have any temperature protection, and some place the battery over the processor heatsink (mini 0806, Nextbase, etc.) so it quickly gets very warm. Supercapacitors don't mind the cold or charging when warm, their maximum temperature however tends to be worse than lithium batteries.

I think the big difference is that the dashcams that are well designed use super capacitors and are designed so they keep the capacitors cool, the dashcams that are poorly designed use batteries and often glue them directly over the hottest components. So the super capacitor dashcams are the ones to choose, it is not so clear that super capacitors are superior to lithium batteries, and the dashcam shouldn't really need either since it is only the fact that most use a file format that gets corrupted if you don't finish writing the file that causes a problem. With a Viofo A119, if you select the TS file format then you could remove the super capacitors and it would still work fine, while with the Nextbase cameras, once the battery has died they refuse to do anything useful!

 

[Dashmellow]

Lithium batteries are fine if you only charge them between 5 and 45 degrees C, should have a life of 15 years. However most dashcams don't have any temperature protection, and some place the battery over the processor heatsink

While positioning a lithium polymer battery over a hot processor could certainly be a problem, that is more a matter of poor design or too small a housing (also design related). The real issue with lithium batteries and heat in dash cams has much more to do with the fact that dash cams are generally mounted high on a motor vehicle's windshield inside a hot cabin on a sunny day. And this factor is critical during the summer months, especially if you live in a hot climate. And of course, charging lithium dash cam batteries at the optimal temperatures you posit is impractical and basically impossible to achieve for a great many users who happen to live in extremely cold or extremely hot climates. This is especially so for some of us who happen to live in parts of the world that experience both extremes, depending upon the season.

 

[Privateer]

I run dual dashcams. Like a few others here, I copy all of my front dashcam's footage to an external hard drive and if necessary also footage from the rear dashcam is copied to the external hard drive. The footage is kept for several years. The SD cards are copied before they are full.

All footage is checked by fast scrubbing through, this ensures that day and night time footage is OK, that the dashcams have a GPS fix and that the date, time, speed, and the location is OK. If there is a problem then it will only have affected a few days' worth of footage and I can take action to quickly fix the problem.

The other thing is to always fully format each (micro) SD card so if there's a problem the formatting process will either fix it or alert you to the fact that you need to throw away the card. Also, keep a few extra cards with you for emergencies. Before I did this I found that when I did need to refer to my dashcam's footage the audio was not syncronised with the video.

Regards,

 

[IAmATeaf]

What is the point of keeping the footage for years, I just let the dashcam scrub over and only pull off anything I’d want to keep?

 

[Privateer]

What is the point of keeping the footage for years

I'm paranoid!

Seriously, you're right. Anything over six months is probably excessive. However, I do like to video our holidays (vacations) with a GoPro and other cameras and it is nice to include some dashcam footage of a road trip.

I just let the dashcam scrub over and only pull off anything I’d want to keep?

I like to keep things for a while in case I get a speeding ticket or parking violation in the post. I can then look through my dashcam footage and see if the evidence from my dashcam confirms it or not. Also, should I hear some time after an incident that the police request dashcam footage at a particular time and location and if I knew that I was in that area, I could check and submit the footage if necessary.

If you don't already, you need to regularly fully format your card especially if you let it write over earlier footage.

Regards,

 

[Nigel]

If you don't already, you need to regularly fully format your card especially if you let it write over earlier footage.

Yes, good idea, doing it every time you get your car serviced is a good idea and ensures it is very regular!

 

[DT MI]

What is the point of keeping the footage for years,...

As I said in my earlier post I find keeping a lot of history is useful for finding patterns in F/W bugs, especially if they occur over multiple releases. I've used historical footage on a number of occasions for this purpose alone. Another use, for me anyhow, is just having it in case I decide at some point in the future that I want to review a video that, at the time it happened, I had no interest in retaining.

Different strokes for different folks. If I didn't have a couple of large hard drives laying around I doubt I'd go out and buy them but since they're available I'll use them.