Modern Vespa

Part 1/4

I installed this a few days ago. Dead simple and works.

Cheap from Amazon/eBay/Aliexpress. Approx AU$100

Is 1080P but I feel the mp4/h264 bitrate is lower than I'd like but saves space on sdcard. Video good enough for average use, not a replacement for GoPro or good brand name 4K dashcam which are AU$800+ for 4k (or 600 for 1080).

general thoughts are in my next comment in this thread. stills from video and installation are further down.

Part 2/4

So why this one?

Let's start with I'm happy I bought it, it's good value and sure beats not having one.

I'd seen 1080p brand name cameras in the local bike store for au$600+ A quick google showed a 4k brand name camera was going to be more like 800+. At those prices I was going to procrastinate for a long time about the likelihood of them being several times better than a cheap au$100 camera and did I really want one?

As noted below it's 10GB/hour. If you want to read number plates of a car in front of you at the lights then this is fine. Recording is in h264 but would really benefit from h265. 4k would also be really nice but of course need more storage (even with h265). If you want to read the plate of a car a long way down the road then you'll need 4K (or more) *AND* a very high bit rate or at least h265.

Looking at the video besupa linked below the brand name units are also suffering from not high enough bitrates but hard to be certain without checking the original recordings (youtube does screw with vid quality). The Viofo in the review look amusingly like mine including the app

What's it like to use?

Dead simple. Starts recording when it gets power. Files are in 5min chunks and separate for front and rear (no fancy software needed as they are normal .ts files). Time is stamped in the corner. GPS speed and lat+lon is also stamped if you have signal. The wifi connection is way slow but simply taking the sdcard out and sticking it in a computer or using an adapter to stick it in a phone works well.

Tagging on here--I'm especially interested in your mounting and automatic looping functionality. Given the craziness around here, and how much better I feel with a dashcam in the car now, I've been interested in pursuing something like this (but was tending towards a helmet-mounted cam).

I started with the Bennett's BikeSocial video
but wasn't entirely happy with the conclusions. I started thinking that the best balance might be the (still-to-be-released-in-the-US) Techalogic DC-2, but I'm very curious about your take on this and how you landed on this model?

I understand that in some states, attaching anything to your helmet is verboten. YMMV.

Very good point! For CA at least, it seems like it's probably fine: "may be decorated by the owner with stick-on items such as decals, Mohawks, Viking horns, etc. and will not affect the safety properties of the helmet": https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/motorcycle-handbook/preparing-to-ride/ .

"Viking horns" is oddly specific...

Part 3/4

stills from video (slightly damaged by MV). It was a grey day with a few showers so hence the darkness of the second pic

due to the mbps of the video the datetime is blurry in the first frame as the scene is more complex vs the second frame where it is pretty clear.

for front + rear it's 10.3GB per hour. GoPro is way more especially if you had one front and rear.

More pics further down in this thread

Part 4/4

Installation:

Front camera is on the right because we ride on the left (better view of oncoming traffic).

Routed the cables to the cameras along the same path as the throttle cables. Needed to buy an extra extension cable for the rear - also cheap from amazon/ebay/aliexpress. Have a cable join behind the headlight for taking the covers off and one between the seat and the rack so I can take the top box off.

Placed the main unit in the glove box using usb power. Cables go through a notch I cut under the fuse box. Currently have the gps dongle in the glovebox but it doesn't get good reception so might have to move it. Didn't bother with the remote switch.

The main unit does warm up a bit when running for a long time (expect the same with fancy brand name cameras). Also the glovebox gets quite hot from being near the radiators on a long ride on a hot day. I do wonder about the longevity of *any brand* when being cooked on long summer day rides ... cooking an expensive brand name to death would suck

I've just added video stills and installation pics (scroll back a bit)

I've also added comments about why this model to the 2nd comment in the thread (rather than have all my thoughts scattered around and hard to read). Will probably grow that comment as I answer more questions

Thank you for this write-up and visuals! I really appreciate the mount point ideas, as that was a bit of a sticking point for me, conceptually, when I was thinking about this the first time. One of the issues with where my bike is is that a lot of items will get stolen by passerbys if that are just there (e.g. RAM mount points, seat covers). Having the lower mounting below the easy eye line (and lower price for that matter) would alleviate some of those worries.

As you mention, it will be interesting to see how things evolve over the summer for you. I'm very interested in both the hardware quality and how the software is interacting with it. One of the odd points that came up with our non-trivially expensive BlackVue in the car is that the write-to-disk/overwrite-to-disk seems to not be as reliable as we had hoped. Even though they require a monthly manual wipe and reset, we've still discovered a couple of odd artifacts. (Honestly, a little surprised by that, but there must be a long enough chain of contractors that it's a miracle anything works at all on it.) I'd love to hear what you think after a little use.

If I could beg a final question. My first use case is: prove that I'm not at fault for an accident with known parties. For that, not getting a clear license plate is not really an issue. My second use case is: getting plates on something more like a hit-and-run. For fun, I tried gaming that out at highway speeds with my GoPro (a few generations old now) and was surprised at how hard things were to make out practically. I supposed one could use super-resolution techniques, but I doubt that would get done in the worst case. Looking at your pictures, they seem to be taken at street speeds. How do you think your camera choice would work for high-speed capture?

I really apprectiate all the detail you have here!

here's some pics from 100kph. fine for your first case but more variable for your second - the trees made it worse. but as you say even with a gopro it's pretty hard so is a bit optimistic to expect anything less than 8K with very high bitrate and massive sdcard to be consistently good at the second case.

(I had to upload them to ImgBB because MV *does* make them worse. Simply upload a png and then download it again it's different and looks worse. I probably just upset someone ...)

Rear at 100 on the freeway:



Front on a country highway with trees which consume a lot of bitrate:

Great--thank you for the follow-up and example pictures! It gives me a lot to think about for the second use case: i.e. what exactly am I trying to accomplish? In a hit-and-run, one would also be dealing with (unfortunately) closer pictures, but at higher "relative velocities" (displacement of object over time on CCD), and maybe odd angles in the end. (I had also not really thought about the higher-information environments producing more artifacting.)

I'm definitely motivated to pursue this a bit more now. I need to get more comfortable with the electrical side of the bike anyways; there's fun in this direction.

Nice clean installation. I would consider doing something like this on my BV but my wife bought me a GoPro for Christmas and I told her I would use it. Maybe I should do both ! GoPro and Dashcam. Advantage of yours is both front and rear cameras. I understand the short term picture time of the dash cam verses long term recording of the GoPro. Anyway-Good inspiration ,thanks.

dashcam is not short term. if you put a big card in it then it records more than a dozen hours on a 128gb. plenty enough time capacity to rip the card out and copy any interesting footage onto a computer at the end of your ride (or even take an sdcard reader and plug into your phone before you even get home).

samples of idiots using this dashcam

(processed in kdenlive + vespa snoop)

That's "great"—the important information is getting captured in practice! I think your setup is a little advanced for me right off the bat, but I'm going to work on installing something patterned after what you have here on a more exposed bike and try to work my way up.