[unfoundnemo]

I've played around with the driver recorder a bit when I first got the car, but only in the sense to make sure it was working and to mess with the settings a bit. I was heading up a nice winding mountain road on my way to a hiking spot over the weekend and decided to take a video actually worth exporting. I setup the recorder to trigger manually via a long press on the camera button prior, so it was certainly easy enough to do on a whim. I basically wanted to get a look at the video and see if it was usable by any means beyond its main intent of collecting evidence in the event of an accident.

I have the camera setup to record all 4 angles all the time, and suspect this has a direct effect on the resolution of the individual cameras based on some prior videos I had stored. I thought about switching to record front-only to see if I got better results and may do that at some point, but I really wouldn't want to be switching settings to only record the front, forget that I made the change, then end up getting in an accident and regretting it, so I just left it as-is.

The export process itself was quite simple, you just place a USB in the center console between the cupholders, select a video, and choose to export (it will prompt if you want to export the selected video or all videos). Exporting 8 video files (which is pushing 800MB) took just about 3 minutes. Each video is placed in it's own folder with the date/time within a parent "DriverRecorder" directory it puts in the root of the drive. The video itself within that folder is simply named "Drive_Recorder_Camera_selection_All" which would only vary depending on the settings, no date/time stamp or other uniqueness on the file, just the folder name.

Most interesting is a json "Metadata" file within each folder that gets exported along with the video. This file contains the VIN at the top tier, then individual elements with a unique ID storing the date, time, velocity, latitude, and longitude throughout the video. My 39.1 second 15 fps video contained 1186 elements with these data points (a little less than 30 per second), I was quite surprised that we were able to export this level of information. For some reason the longitude was showing as 0.0000 in all of my files, but the latitude seemed correct.

Here's the full video with all angles. A bit annoying that a couple of the cameras seem to be misaligned, but not horrible (note, youtube will re-compress the video, but it didn't seem to impact the quality that much):

Video specs are as follows:
Time: 39.1 Seconds (not quite the 20 seconds before and after press)
Resolution: 1280 x 960
Bitrate: 20848 kbps
Framerate: 15 fps
Size: 97.9 MB
File Format: TS
Encoding: MPEG-2

Next, I just went ahead and cropped down the video to only show the front angle since this would likely be the intended view of a manual recording (again, I wouldn't want to switch it away from recording all angles all the time). The result isn't too horrible:

While I was going through the exported files, I noted one video file was named differently, "Drive_Recorder_Camera_selection_Parking_drivi ng". This was a couple of months old, but I recall being in an automated touchless carwash (using the carwash view), toggling to the 3D View and manually triggering the recording to see what happened. Surprisingly, this basically just recorded what was on screen and not what the individual cameras were seeing. This was also my hint that different camera angle recording selections would result in different video resolutions as this video was 1280x480 and 30 fps. I could confirm if needed, but would expect a front-only video to be 1280 x 720 @ 30 fps. Here's the carwash 3D view video if you're curious what I'm referring to:

So... is the video usable beyond evidence and some initial novelty? I would think so, I was heading up that mountain road and somewhat excited to watch it back. Sure, I could get a 4k dash cam and record some amazing video, but that would likely be reserved for track days with the M car. If I didn't have 3 kids and a dog in the car at the time, carving through a tighter section at speeds that seem ridiculous for a beast of this size would likely be shareable even at this quality.

[ivinioX7]

Originally Posted by unfoundnemo

I've played around with the driver recorder a bit when I first got the car, but only in the sense to make sure it was working and to mess with the settings a bit. I was heading up a nice winding mountain road on my way to a hiking spot over the weekend and decided to take a video actually worth exporting. I setup the recorder to trigger manually via a long press on the camera button prior, so it was certainly easy enough to do on a whim. I basically wanted to get a look at the video and see if it was usable by any means beyond its main intent of collecting evidence in the event of an accident.

I have the camera setup to record all 4 angles all the time, and suspect this has a direct effect on the resolution of the individual cameras based on some prior videos I had stored. I thought about switching to record front-only to see if I got better results and may do that at some point, but I really wouldn't want to be switching settings to only record the front, forget that I made the change, then end up getting in an accident and regretting it, so I just left it as-is.

The export process itself was quite simple, you just place a USB in the center console between the cupholders, select a video, and choose to export (it will prompt if you want to export the selected video or all videos). Exporting 8 video files (which is pushing 800MB) took just about 3 minutes. Each video is placed in it's own folder with the date/time within a parent "DriverRecorder" directory it puts in the root of the drive. The video itself within that folder is simply named "Drive_Recorder_Camera_selection_All" which would only vary depending on the settings, no date/time stamp or other uniqueness on the file, just the folder name.

Most interesting is a json "Metadata" file within each folder that gets exported along with the video. This file contains the VIN at the top tier, then individual elements with a unique ID storing the date, time, velocity, latitude, and longitude throughout the video. My 39.1 second 15 fps video contained 1186 elements with these data points (a little less than 30 per second), I was quite surprised that we were able to export this level of information. For some reason the longitude was showing as 0.0000 in all of my files, but the latitude seemed correct.

Here's the full video with all angles. A bit annoying that a couple of the cameras seem to be misaligned, but not horrible (note, youtube will re-compress the video, but it didn't seem to impact the quality that much):

Video specs are as follows:
Time: 39.1 Seconds (not quite the 20 seconds before and after press)
Resolution: 1280 x 960
Bitrate: 20848 kbps
Framerate: 15 fps
Size: 97.9 MB
File Format: TS
Encoding: MPEG-2

Next, I just went ahead and cropped down the video to only show the front angle since this would likely be the intended view of a manual recording (again, I wouldn't want to switch it away from recording all angles all the time). The result isn't too horrible:

While I was going through the exported files, I noted one video file was named differently, "Drive_Recorder_Camera_selection_Parking_drivi ng". This was a couple of months old, but I recall being in an automated touchless carwash (using the carwash view), toggling to the 3D View and manually triggering the recording to see what happened. Surprisingly, this basically just recorded what was on screen and not what the individual cameras were seeing. This was also my hint that different camera angle recording selections would result in different video resolutions as this video was 1280x480 and 30 fps. I could confirm if needed, but would expect a front-only video to be 1280 x 720 @ 30 fps. Here's the carwash 3D view video if you're curious what I'm referring to:

So... is the video usable beyond evidence and some initial novelty? I would think so, I was heading up that mountain road and somewhat excited to watch it back. Sure, I could get a 4k dash cam and record some amazing video, but that would likely be reserved for track days with the M car. If I didn't have 3 kids and a dog in the car at the time, carving through a tighter section at speeds that seem ridiculous for a beast of this size would likely be shareable even at this quality.

How were you able to download it to the USB? I've tried multiple USB memory cards to download recorded video without success. Any ideas?

[unfoundnemo]

Originally Posted by ivinioX7

How were you able to download it to the USB? I've tried multiple USB memory cards to download recorded video without success. Any ideas?

Hit the "Option" button while in the video list and hit "Export". If it's having issues writing, maybe try formatting the drive differently.

Might be the "M" you have next to your X7 in the profile too, the M gods might just be frowning on you.

[ivinioX7]

Ugh, I thought I squared things with the M gods by sacrificing and paying premium for everything with an M in it.

I'll try different formats and see if it works. This morning, I captured a funny video of a lady flipping me off at the intersection for no apparent reason. She might be related to those M gods you were speaking of.

Originally Posted by unfoundnemo

Hit the "Option" button while in the video list and hit "Export". If it's having issues writing, maybe try formatting the drive differently.

Might be the "M" you have next to your X7 in the profile too, the M gods might just be frowning on you.

[PinkNinja400Guy]

I use a FAT32 formatted USB and have never had an issue with exporting. It'll create a "DriveRecorder" folder in the root of the USB filesystem if it doesn't already exist, and put the exports into there.

[millerghr99]

So, does this mean there is no need for the ACE 3.0 for the X7?

https://www.shopbmwusa.com/PRODUCT/1...O-WITH-DISPLAY

[Mail4loys]

Originally Posted by millerghr99

So, does this mean there is no need for the ACE 3.0 for the X7?

https://www.shopbmwusa.com/PRODUCT/1...O-WITH-DISPLAY

dashcam is definitely needed. drive recorder is not that reliable to record in case of a event

[unfoundnemo]

Originally Posted by millerghr99

So, does this mean there is no need for the ACE 3.0 for the X7?

https://www.shopbmwusa.com/PRODUCT/1...O-WITH-DISPLAY

I wouldn't go with that solution regardless (get yourself a BlackVue, Owl Cam, etc.) if you want a real dashcam.

Drive Recorder isn't recording all the time... it has to be triggered manually, or by an accident... and not all accidents are created equal (e.g. there are numerous reports of small fender-bender, side swipes, etc., not getting recorded... likely have to be hit hard enough to deploy some airbags).

[millerghr99]

Thanks all!