I recently purchased a dedicated dashcam on sale to replace my GoPro setup for trip videos. This gives me a new need to understand a new file format.
The Roav Dashcam stores sequential mp4 files. When configuring the camera it’s possible to set the loop time, which is the duration of each mp4. There’s also an option to watermark the files. I have it turned on, and the only thing I’ve noticed is the ROAV logo, timestamp, and speed in the bottom right. It does not appear to have a way of adjusting the size of the text.
My initial recordings were set to run at 1080p 60 fps. I wanted to concatenate multiple files, add some text of my own, and speed up the video. This was my first experience using the -filter_complex option of FFMPEG. Here’s what I came up with to put together three files, speed the output up by a factor of 60, and add some text. I’m dropping the audio completely. The ROAV can record audio inside the car, but I configured it not to, as I don’t want to hear what I was listening to on the radio or what I might be saying if I make a phone call..
ffmpeg.exe -hide_banner -i 2018_0512_130537_050A.MP4 -i 2018_0512_131537_051A.MP4 -i 2018_0512_132537_052A.MP4 -filter_complex "[0:v] [1:v] [2:v] concat=n=3:v=1 [v];[v]setpts=0.01666*PTS,drawtext=fontfile=C\\:/WINDOWS/Fonts/consola.ttf:fontcolor=white:fontsize=80:y=main_h-text_h-50:x=50:text=WimsWorld[o]" -map "[o]" -c:v libx265 -crf 23 -preset veryfast -movflags +faststart -bf 2 -g 15 -pix_fmt yuv420p FirstMixSpeed60Concat.mp4
This first video was recorded at 1080p60. The camera can record at 1440p30 which I will be trying soon to see if things like license plates are more legible. The setpts factor that I’m currently using was 1/60, so that 1 minute of real time was compressed to 1 second of video, and just dropping the extra frames. I expect to need to change the setpts factor to 1/30 because of the decreased frame rate at the higher resolution.
WimsWorld 