My BlackVue DR400G-HD DashCam Review

[AusStig]

My only challenge so far is that my car doesn't turn off the power to the cigarette lighters, so it just remains on unless I unplug it. Which is not so much an issue since I always intended to hard-wire. In which case, can someone who has cut off the cigarette socket in order to hard-wire, which wire goes where? I had my radar detector hard-wired by an auto-electrician, but was hoping to DIY this one.

Cheers

TAke the wires out of the cig plug and put one side on the positive and one on the negative. You have to find out which wire is positive and which is negative. Its not in front of me now but I can find out when I get home

Thanks mate, would appreciate if you could let me know.

[OZONE]

Hi all, first of all thanks to the reviews and the wealth of information found on this thread I went ahead and got the DR400G. Very quick shipping and easy purchase through Bestdigitshop2 on the bay. It arrived without any software installed on the microSD, but the seller gave me the two links to the SD card formatter software and the latest firmware. Went ahead and formatted and then installed. All good.

My only challenge so far is that my car doesn't turn off the power to the cigarette lighters, so it just remains on unless I unplug it. Which is not so much an issue since I always intended to hard-wire. In which case, can someone who has cut off the cigarette socket in order to hard-wire, which wire goes where? I had my radar detector hard-wired by an auto-electrician, but was hoping to DIY this one.

Cheers

Just cut the end off and tell us the colours of the wires. Or you can google it.

Red = positive
Black = Negative

Black with White Stripe = positive
Solid Black = Negative

[Mech33]

Mine continues to act up a bit. Occasionally the GPS light goes off and on while driving, while my 2nd camera stays on solid. I suppose it's possible that there is some interference in one location of the car compared to another.

Then today when I turned off the car, the GPS light stayed on for about 2 minutes and it never did the blinking "writing" LED during shutdown.

So I took the card out and read the data (suspecting that there might be an issue), and all of the video files are there (nothing missing).

There's something funky going on...

[Andrew21]

My only challenge so far is that my car doesn't turn off the power to the cigarette lighters, so it just remains on unless I unplug it. Which is not so much an issue since I always intended to hard-wire. In which case, can someone who has cut off the cigarette socket in order to hard-wire, which wire goes where? I had my radar detector hard-wired by an auto-electrician, but was hoping to DIY this one.

Cheers

TAke the wires out of the cig plug and put one side on the positive and one on the negative. You have to find out which wire is positive and which is negative. Its not in front of me now but I can find out when I get home

Thanks mate, would appreciate if you could let me know.

go here....

http://www.radardetectorforum.org/showthread.php?t=9499&page=7&p=127993&viewfull=1#post127993

like Ozone said, red=positive black=negative.

[switch626]

Is there an option to disable the GPS on the BlackVue DR400G?

[kpatz]

You can turn off the speed readout that is overlaid on the video. I don't know that there is a way to turn GPS off completely. The GPS data is stored on the SD card in separate files from the video, so if you extract and post video (MP4 files), there will be NO GPS data present. The GPS files are only used by the Blackvue software to give you speed/location info when viewing video with their software.

[hiddencam]

... so if you extract and post video (MP4 files), there will be NO GPS data present.

Actually that's not true; the time and GPS data are encoded into the MP4 files.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk 2

[kpatz]

... so if you extract and post video (MP4 files), there will be NO GPS data present.

Actually that's not true; the time and GPS data are encoded into the MP4 files.

Do you have proof of this? Or a way to extract the data? If you look in the Record folder on the SD card there are 3 files for each video segment; a .mp4 file, a .gps file and one other that contains the accelerometer data.

[hiddencam]

... so if you extract and post video (MP4 files), there will be NO GPS data present.

Actually that's not true; the time and GPS data are encoded into the MP4 files.

Do you have proof of this? Or a way to extract the data? If you look in the Record folder on the SD card there are 3 files for each video segment; a .mp4 file, a .gps file and one other that contains the accelerometer data.

Yes, try copying just an mp4 file to you computer and view it without using the black vue software. You'll see your proof 8)

And in all the videos I've posted here since getting this camera I've just copied the MP4s straight to my MacBook Pro joined/trimmed and uploaded to YouTube without using the black vue software (since there isn't a Mac version)...the time and GPS data is always right there on the recording. I like that a LOT! Not having to mess with encoding the data onto the file is a big plus for me. Perhaps the other 2 files that go with each mp4 are specially for the Black vue program.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk 2

[kpatz]

the time and GPS data is always right there on the recording.

Do you mean the date/time stamp and the (optional) speed stamp that displays in the lower left corner of the video? That isn't full GPS data, and the speed display can be turned off in the camera's settings. Full GPS data would include coordinates so you can find your location on Google Maps etc. That data isn't in the MP4 as far as I can tell.

I took an MP4 file copied direct from my Blackvue and run Exiftool on it, and it didn't find any GPS or location-related tags within the file.