Unusual Issue with multiple A139's after more than a year issue free.

thebravo

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Hi Guys,

A quick intro before I dive into the issues, feel free to skip if you just want to review whats going on with my A139's. I'm thebravo, I'm staff over on rdforum and heavily into electronic countermeasures and of course dashcams. I got into dash cams back in the 2015 era, starting with a fairly basic taotronics 1080P unit. I ran a few separate dashcam's in my last vehicle 2010 Honda Odyssey covering the front rear and inside. Sadly that vehicle met it's end in a very bad collision back in 2020. A speeding vehicle on the other side of the divided multi-lane road lost control came over the median and hit me head on, got hit from behind 0.3 seconds later as I got shoved into an adjacent lane from the initial impact, hit two more times less severely from other vehicles as we were spinning out. My front single channel 2k taotronics dash camera snapped off at the hinge joint on impact and was ejected from the vehicle. The rear one also snapped of at the joint on impact but wasn't recording at the time due to a bad SD card. My overhead interior entry level blackvue 2 channel system stayed in place and captured the interior of the vehicle during the accident and continued to record through the extrication process. The footage of the accident was very helpful in the legal proceedings afterwards We replaced that Odyssey with a newer Honda Odyssey and I set out to get dashcams installed promptly. I grabbed the A129plus and a vantrue N2pro on a black friday deal, the A129 plus covered front and rear, the Vantrue was placed overhead where my blackvue used to be and the blackvue which had survived the crash was setup for left and right facing. I decided low profile adhesive mounts were the way to go as all the other style mounts failed during the crash. I signed up to be a Viofo Reviewer, and I got an email from them a couple months later asking if I would indeed review for them. The first camera they sent me to review was an A139. I coincidentally won a second A139 in a raffle, which replaced a not great dashcam install in my wifes car.

So now to the Issue, the camera in my car which is a couple months older than the one in my wifes car worked perfectly for the first year or so, but finally had it's first issue and it's an odd but serious one. I went to pull footage for a few interesting events that happened on a trip, I decided to download them via wifi. I started the car and it did the usual start up voice announcement (recording three channels started) and I connected via wifi, I went into the recordings folder, but everything in there was old... like a month old. I so I pulled the card and put it in my computer and yep, the last recording on the card was about a month ago. The camera had been starting up and announcing it was recording/ and going into parking mode with the parking mode announcement, buttons worked lights were all on, but nothing was being written to the card for a month. Yikes. luckily when I put the A139 in my car I didn't feel like unwiring the A129 plus, (I did disable parking mode) but it was still running when I was driving so the A129 had the footage I needed. I did note that the last recording the A139 captured before taking a month off, was a parking mode recording. It was the most recent dated file on the card, it had been in parking mode for a while as there were a bunch of parking mode recordings from the same date. Likely the last file was when the camera shutdown at the low voltage cutoff set on the hardwire, oddly though the last file was corrupt and unreadable in any video players including VLC. I formatted the card, the camera started recording normally and actually writing data to the card. It was a couple months later and I went to pull some footage and to my dismay it had failed again in the same manner. It had not been recording for about 3 weeks, but it appeared to be working and was consistently announcing that it was recording. I replaced the SD card with a new one this time.

A little over a month later I started having a random dead battery in my car, I might not drive the car for a 3-4 days and it would be fine, but then other times it would be dead overnight less than 12 hours since I last drove the car. And by dead I mean less than 10 volts. It was very random, might have a dead battery once in 2 weeks or might have it be dead a couple days in a row. I had the battery and charging system checked and everything tested fine. I Had another recording failure during this time, where the camera appeared to be working but nothing was being written to the card. I pulled the card and again the last recording was parking mode, and it was corrupt/unreadable. I dug in on my intermittent dead battery issue, and to do parasitic draw tests I disconnected the A139. I started unplugging the USB from the A139 every time I parked for anything over an hour or so, and the dead battery issue stopped happening. So I started leaving it plugged in and the dead battery thing began to happen again, though still intermittent. My Viofo rep said it's possible the issues are related, and since my wifes A139 had been flawless he suggested we swap the main units between cars and see if the issue moved with the camera or stayed with the car. I didn't get to do things right away as life intervened.

Before I was able to do the work required to do this swapping around of cameras and installing a spare camera as backup in her car I went back to unplugging my camera every time I parked to avoid dead batteries. I noticed something, every time I would unplug it the last driving clip would be corrupt/unreadable. In the mean time my wife came home and asked me to pull footage from her A139 as there had been a motorcycle wreck behind and next to her on her commute. I was going to wifi download it and started her car, her A139 announced three channel recording started, I enabled wifi and discovered the last thing showing in the app was nearly a month old... I pulled the card and yep it had experienced the exact same issue as the A139 in my car, only there was no redundant backup in her car so I had no footage of the initial car vs motorcycle impact. I checked further on her card and wouldn't you know, the last recording was in parking mode after being in parking mode a while and yep, it's corrupt/unreadable. I installed the A129 plus immediately in her car and I put a new card in her A139 but didn't swap the A139's yet, wanted to make sure everything was good with the A129 plus for a couple weeks. I drove her car this past weekend and I didn't get the usual voice announcement from her A139. I looked up and no lights on it, no response to buttons, it is slightly warm to touch but thats it. I tried it in the house on a wall charger with a usb C cable and nothing, reset button didn't help. It's dead, it does get warm to touch after a while of being plugged in suggesting it's consuming voltage but it's not able to actually start. I decided to pull the card and see what the last thing it recorded was, you should be able to guess what it was by now. Parking mode, last clip unreadable/corrupt.

On both of the A139's something has happened over the now approaching 2 years I have had them and they both have experienced the same fault. If I'm correct these cameras have a capacitor/battery (likely a capacitor) to provide a short bit of power to the camera once external power is lost so that the camera can finish writing the video file and shutdown cleanly. My A129plus and all my other cameras do this , they stay alive for an additional couple seconds after power loss before shutting down to finish writing the files. I believe my A139's used to do this, though as I had them wired for parking mode they rarely shut down when I was in the car. I don't recall having corrupt parking mode files at the low voltage cutoff during the first year. It would seem that at least sometimes when the camera abruptly shuts down it causes corruption on the card that prevents the camera from writing new data successfully. The camera doesn't detect this failure and continues to announce correct operation when in fact isn't not writing any footage to the card. I'm suspecting that capacitor/battery has failed in both of my A139's, it would explain the file corruption on power loss and might explain why my wifes isn't powering up (bad capacitors are known to cause this in a host of electronic devices). I think additionally I have a failing hardwire in my car thats is intermittently failing to shut the unit down and is draining the battery. I do live in FL, so it is hot down here, and while I have never had the cameras shut down on overtemp, they are in a hot car a lot which isn't great for batteries / capacitors in the long run. I have both units mounted such that they are in the shade during the hottest part of the day, I have the windows cracked open and sunshades in the windshield to keep it from getting extremely hot in the cars but it's still hot in there.

I haven't heard back from my contact at Viofo yet, though he's not technically a support person. I will reach out to Viofo support, with these being more than a year old I don't know that they will help me but maybe. If they don't end up taking them back I will probably open them up and see if I can find the fault, if it's a bad cap, I might even be able to replace it as I have some experience with replacing failed capacitors in power supplies...

I have really liked the A139 otherwise, they were very solid the first year, I love having the internal footage as I can say internal footage helped in the last accident. I hope there is a resolution for this, cause there aren't a lot of options in the 3 channel lineup that I check all the boxes that the A139 does but dropping $400+ dollars to replace them with two more A139's that may also die after a little over a year is not something I'm wanting to do.
 
@thebravo you might get more responses if you summarize what you want help with.

Corrupt files usually indicate faulty capacitors but to have 2 units go at the same time i think is unusual.

Wasn't clear if you did swap Dashcam and /or power converter.

Checking your voltage levels and check if there was a chance the Dashcams were exposed to a voltage/current spike.

Cheers D.
 
Maybe i missed it because it's too long, but have you tested the loop recording options for the case that causes the recording to stop?
Of course, if it's not recording, the camera should warn about it. However, if there is a corrupted file, this file cannot be deleted and if it tries to write to the same file, this situation may have occurred.
 
Thanks for the response guys, I will summarize here to make things clearer, should have done a TLDR :)

The A139 in my car is about 4 months older than the one in my wifes car and it started with the corrupted file/ not recording issue about 6 months before the one in my wifes car had it happen the first time. My A139 is still powering up and working with the occasional bout of "recording claiming to happen while not actually recording data to the card". Her's had a short bout of the no recording data to the card failure before going fully dead.

I did not swap A139's between cars, the corruption/ not recording issue appeared on my wifes A139 just before I was going to swap them, so I didn't bother.

I have not yet replaced the power cable in my car, it's a larger task as I have a lot installed in my car so cables are ziptied to things for neatness. I removed trim panels to route my cables very carefully, as during our accident I had issues with powercables being pulled when the side curtain airbags went off so in the new install I routed things very carefully to avoid any chance of airbag deployment ripping the cables loose. With the intermittent failure to record issue and the failure of my wifes A139, I don't know if it's worth the effort to replace the cable as it seems the camera is likely also failing and may need to be replaced.

It's good to hear that capacitors are potentially the cause of it, I came to that conclusion logically so if others have seen that cause problems in the past then maybe I'm on the right track. Depending on how small they are and their location perhaps I can replace them myself if Viofo doesn't replace the cameras.

I have a voltage monitor in my car and it reads pretty steady at about 14 volts when the car is running, I also have a lot of electronics in my car (4 separate multichannel dashcams) radar detectors (both remote and windshield mounted, one of which also has a voltage display) Laser systems etc, which are all hardwired. The A129 Plus was wired to the same fuse tap as the A139 plus in may car and I have yet to have an issue with the A129 plus despite being about 3 months older, though agreeably it's not used in parking mode, only the A139 which is running many hours in a hot parked car. A couple of those systems are fairly picky about voltage and will throw warnings if there is low voltage or a power spike... so while I suppose it's possible there was a surge at some point I would lean toward that not being the cause. Having both A139's fail in a similar manner in two separate cars would be unusual if it was a power surge issue.

I'm not so much looking for help persay, I was wondering if anyone else with an A139 has seen this issue of the system leaving a corrupt file when parking mode is cutoff by the low voltage cutoff and then failing to record after that while indicating that everything is good. To me this is probably the worst type of failure as it's not detectable until you go to pull footage as the camera appears to operate normally, it even says it's working normally audibly, but nothing is being captured. I was hoping running higher end cameras than what I used previously I wouldn't run into issues of missing video, I personally don't mind having multiple camera systems running in the car for redundant backup, but for most folks this isn't an option so having silent failure like this would be really bad for a normal person with only the A139 in their car. it would be really bad if they were involved in an incident and went pulled the video footage to show what happened to find there was nothing being written.

I did try changing the parking mode option on my wifes camera after the first corruption/ recording failure, I went from event detection to low bitrate. All settings were the same on mine. I didn't play with the loop recording options, I have both on 3 minute clips. When the failure occurs the camera isn't recording any additional footage and then eventually reaching the corrupt file and not be able to overwrite it, once the corrupt file is there it can't record at all, but it's not every time there is a corrupt file only sometimes. I'm not actually fully certain thats the cause of the failed recording, all I can say is that every time I have found the camera claiming to record while not actually writing data to the card, the last file that was written to the card is is a corrupt parking mode file that seems like it was occurring when the camera went off on low voltage cutoff. It's intermittent, I could go a month or two without the failure to record happening and I'd have to imagine the camera went off on low voltage cutoff multiple times during that period. Also in my car since I'm unplugging it every time I get home due to the intermittent failure of the low voltage cutoff I get a corrupt file at the end of every drive I take and it seems to be ok recording the next time I drive the majority of the time...
 
I did hear back from support today, they agree capacitor failure is the likely cause of the issue. Based on that response I suspect they have seen it before. I checked and my A139's are from early 2021 so one made it about 18 months and the other almost made 2 years. Not what I would have expected for longevity at this price point... We shall see if they help with them out of warranty or provide a discounted rate to upgrade to the pro or if I'm on my own... I will open them up and see if I can fix the capacitor if Viofo doesn't want them back, maybe if it's an easy enough fix I can make a tutorial.
 
Most all Viofo dash cams have heat dissipation issues. They are known to become hot even in cold weather. If it was not for Heat problems, Viofo would be a very good product. Their Super Capacitors are not of high quality or military grade and with the overheating issues bound to fail before their time. Electronics do not function or last long under intense heat, think about computer processors aka microchips. I refuse to purchase a Viofo dash cam for this reason. Thinkware U1000 and BlackVue DR900X-Plus are excellent alternatives, even though they do not possess the Sony STARVIS 2 IMX678 which provides High Dynamic Range and 4K resolution as the A139 Pro has. There is no reason to spend $200 USD or more on a dash cam from Viofo that will fail in one to two years due to heat dissipation problems and use of an inferior super capacitor.
I've spent nearly 26 years in the U.S. Navy as an Aviation Electronics Technician and many more years in the Electronic/Electrical Maintenance and Repair field as a civilian. Yes! I worked on Electronic Warfare or Electronic Counter Measures aka Jammers and Chaff Flare. Also, with Radar, Navigation, Communications, and Cryptology. Some minor Calibration working in NIST Lab. A bit of computer languages programming too (Fortran, Cobol, C+, dibbing in Applesoft). My first computer was a Commodore 64, then Apple IIe, a couple IBM's, Gateway, Compaq, and then roughly 7 or 8 DIY (Do-it -Yourself builds) Desktops. I first learned on Dumb terminals and WANG computers. In the Navy worked both on the Aircrafts (O-Level) and performed In-Shop repairs (I-Level). - I still don't know everything. Back in High School had small boats wood shop building, residential wiring, went to Tech school for Radio and TV repair which we had Tubes not transistors. The technology world is enormous!!! I hope that Viofo has taken all your information into account in making their products better. I've seen the world but only a fraction of it.
 
Most all Viofo dash cams have heat dissipation issues. They are known to become hot even in cold weather. If it was not for Heat problems, Viofo would be a very good product. Their Super Capacitors are not of high quality or military grade and with the overheating issues bound to fail before their time. Electronics do not function or last long under intense heat, think about computer processors aka microchips.
And were are the evidence for this foolish first statement on this forum?!
We don't care for your irrelevant work experience wich has nothing to do with dashcams.
 
And were are the evidence for this foolish first statement on this forum?!
We don't care for your irrelevant work experience wich has nothing to do with dashcams.
And why does this matter to you? Experience means a lot. Guess you have none. Also, if you nothing nice to say, then say nothing at all.
 
Experience means a lot.

Viofo would be a very good product. Their Super Capacitors are not of high quality or military grade and with the overheating issues bound to fail before their time.

FWIW, I've had hands-on experience with dozens of dash cams going back more than 12 years now. I've been running two Viofo A119 V3s for over three years under all kinds of adverse conditions in both extreme heat and extreme sub-zero temperatures and they have not skipped a beat. They are in fact the most reliable dash cameras I have ever owned.
 
I have only beaten on Viofo cameras for a few years, but others for a decade.
Testing viofo have been as unproblematic as any other brand that are good, i have of course also had a little bad luck.
Testing a zenfox camera, that was a fight
testing one of the mini series cameras ( 0906 ) it did die on me pretty fast but other testers did better, i later got the K2S camera, though som reported a sound issue i also had, then i still used the camera for a few years before it died on me ( it was my side camera system )

These days it is rare i have a system in my car for 2 full years testing there, most cameras move from the car to static testing in my south facing living room window.
This might change as i think the brands have found other testers to work with, which are also perfectly fine with me, people should do as they please.

Most dashcams get hot, some even very hot, you cant really do much in regard to proper cooling into these small form factors,,,,, which is also why i strongly argue for remote systems with the main unit not being so damn small, then you could actually put a proper heat pipe / chamber cooler on there, even active cooling too if needed in regular or parking guard scenarios.
 
not of high quality or military grade
I’ve been testing dash cams for 3 years now. I’ve tested the absolute cheapest junk from Walmart & Amazon, and some premium Korean made dash cams from GNET, BlackVue, and FineVu, and a lot in between. I consider Viofo a “budget” class dash cam manufacturer. However, based on my experience with the A129 Pro, A129 Plus, A119 Mini, A229, and A139 Pro I think Viofo is the “highest quality Chinese” dash cam if that makes any sense.

I get what you mean about the heat dissipation issues. But that’s because Viofo is always pushing the limits with high bitrates, and trying to squeeze out the highest level of performance of the hardware in an attempt to produce the best image quality possible. I remember back when @Vortex Radar did a 4K shootout with the flagships from Viofo, BlackVue, and Thinkware. I was surprised how well the Viofo did for half the money compared to the big guns of Korea.
-Chuck
 
I remember taking a small matchbox camera from its intended bitrate of 16 / 18 mbit to 35 mbit using mod firmware, it worled excellent also for a while.
Mind you on that 1080p camera using the OV4689 sensor 28 mbit was sufficient to not have blocking when you drove into / past high detain areas.

Even today you will still see dashcams "clog" up when you drive into such high detail area, but it cant all be rolling grass plains on either side of the road.
And personally i feel dashcams should be geared for that, and not just getting by as most are actually doing.

The hardware can clearly handle it, though if you want to to do that for years, well you have to go further than a small ALU heatsink stuck to a chip inside a tiny plastic case with a few holes in it.
 
Lets say someone made a dual remote camera, with the new 1080p starvis 2 sensors with 3 - 4 micron pixels, running 50 mbit on each channel, maybe a proper working HDR too, recording on a main unit with proper cooling on it.
I would so snag up that system if i got the chance.
 
There is no reason to spend $200 USD or more on a dash cam from Viofo that will fail in one to two years due to heat dissipation problems and use of an inferior super capacitor.

BTW, I forgot to mention that I paid $85.00 each (on sale) for my A119 V3 cams more than three years ago. Aside from the 100% reliability, the 2K performance and low light capabilities of the IMX335 has been impressive.

So, I guess I agree in a sense; there is no reason to spend $200 USD on a dash cam from Viofo, unless of course you want some of the performance and features offered by their other models.
 
I have had great luck with the A129 plus, it outlasted the A139's, though it wasn't run in parking mode which I think is what killed the A139's. Running in parking mode for several hours a day in a hot car here in south florida puts more stress on the components (capacitors aren't known to like high temps, if you look back into the consumer electronics from the 2000's there were a ton with capacitor failures in TB's, computers and such due to poor temperature control.). I have a couple A119v3's in my parents cars and so far so good, but I don't have them wired for parking mode.

The reason I liked the A139 was the interior camera, we were in a very bad wreck a couple years back and I had an older blackvue mounted near my sunroof that covered the inside of the car. That footage was very helpful figuring out our injuries and if needed showing them to insurance as they don't like to payout. You could see our knees go into the dashboard and such as we were taking various hits from other cars as we spun out from the first head on crash. So having a camera with the inside view was important to me. I ultimately have redundant front/rear cameras, a left/right camera, and an overhead camera in my car (plus the a139 interior cam), my wife's has redundant front/rear and a left/right and the 139 interior cam. It's cheap insurance as there are too many hit and run it dishonest people out there these days.

I will give Viofo credit. I worked with their tech support and they replaced both of my A139's without issue at no charge despite them technically being outside of the warranty period.

Sadly my wife was in a wreck last week while her A139 was out for replacement, but I had installed my A129 plus in her car to cover while the 139 was out so that captured the external info which was sufficient in this case. I have to go clean out her car tomorrow and I hope the rear cameras and inside cameras from the A139 are still inside.
 
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