Apologies for not being super knowledgeable on dash cams.
Would anyone care to give a quick rundown on the cooler aspects of having a blackvue front + rear setup?
I have searched through a few threads. Read a few amazon reviews. Even read up on the BV650 on BV's website...but there are still a few questions that come to mind:
1) more of a statement, it sounds like you can tap into continuous power easily, and complete the whole front + rear setup easily in one day. This means, basically, once it's in, you're set and you don't have to fiddle with anything. The cams will literally run 24/7 if you want. And for all practical purposes will never run down your battery (since the drive battery continuously tops up the 12V battery)
Yes, it's easy to tap in to, unless you are of the rare vintage car that doesn't have the little connector in the mic port. Then it becomes more problematic. Once it's in, you don't have to fiddle with it, except to format your MicroSD card once a month or so, depending on the card. The only reason to do that is to prevent write wearing of the card. The larger the card, the less often you have to do that.
2) how much video (in minutes) will fit on a 64G card?
Depends on if you are recording 1080p on both channels and at what framerate. 1080p @30fps is probably around 15 hours... I'm not sure.
3) let's guess that the answer to 2 is 15 hours of 2 channel (front + rear) HD video at 30fps. So, do you set it up so it simply is caching your last 15 hours? And, you hope if someone smashes your car while parked, that you return within 15 hours to stop recording?
Yes, but if you're parked, then you just set it to record on motion... then you save a lot of space since it will only record if something is happening around the car. If you are parked near Wifi, the 650 has built in cloud upload, so you can set it to upload all your data to the cloud as it goes along. Doesn't help if you're parked somewhere without wifi though.
4) it sounds like you could spin the front camera to look back at you. Sounds kinda fun. But, don't you want the camera hidden behind the rear view mirror? Which would block recording yourself singing bohemian rhapsody? Is there a trade off here?
You could.. it would be upside down, but that's an easy fix. I hide mine behind the rear view mirror, I have no need or desire to watch myself drive... although I would like that option for Ludicrous launches.
5) is finding, and pulling just the video you want pretty easy?
This is one of the areas where Blackvue kind of fails. If you are trying to do it over wifi, it sucks donkey-balls... it's much easier to take out the SD card and search for what you want on a computer. Blackvue needs work in this area.
6) for 5, do you just park in your driveway, assuming your car is within wifi range of your home, and you walk in to your house, sit at your iMac and just yank video off the cams over wifi (presumably while it could still be recording?)
See above ... you CAN do this, but I don't reccommend it. It's slow, slow, slow and kind of a clunky interface.
7) if someone knew what to look for, and they smashed your window, couldn't they simply rip out the cam and you'd lose all your video? The cloud backup only works when you return home to wifi, yes? Are these cams much better for recording moving violations than stationary break ins?
Yes, that's correct. I know of a guy who put in like 6 cameras around his car and had them uploading to a little mini-server in a lockbox in the trunk that was bolted to the frame... so even if someone stole everything in the car, the video was still safe in the trunk. That's a little extreme though.
8) am I missing any other really cool features?
One of the nicest features I like about the Blackvue is the mapping, GPS and speed data. You can follow your route on Google Maps via the Blackvue app, showing different speeds, etc..
9) is it worth waiting for the next generation of BV to come out? Sounds like there are a bunch of cons (not mentioned what) might they be solved in the next iteration?
No, I don't think waiting will get you much. They don't seem to fix the flaws very often, as they aren't so annoying that it makes people not buy them, they are just minor annoyances... so they don't have any incentive to fix them. The 650 is probably the closest I've seen to a perfect Dashcam. It's definitely not perfect (far from it) but from all the options out there, it's easily the best I've found. I would certaily be open to other ones if someone has a compelling argument for it.
