Dashcam Viewer v3.4.0 was released today for both Mac and Windows with a bevy of new features and bug fixes:
General Improvements:
- Introduced Dashcam Viewer PRO for Mac and Windows.The Pro versions adds more capabilities, including GoPro HERO support and OpenStreetMaps, and increased number of Geotags. Differences between the Free, Standard, and Pro versions are shown below.
Key differences between Free, Standard and PRO
The new Pro version is $75 and an upgrade path from Standard to Pro is available.
- Added new Audio Event Detection capability.
Important events in the video series are often characterized by sudden changes in volume. For example, the sound of a collision or the sound of a horn can be heard against the normal driving noise background. Dashcam Viewer’s Audio Event Detection can assist in locating key sound events in a series of videos.
Audio Event Detection widgets
Audio events will appear as little squares along the graph time axis. You can quickly jump to an event by using the blue forward and back buttons. The detection algorithm sensitivity can be varied by increasing or decreasing the sensitivity control from 1 to 10. As the control value is decreased, more squares will appear. Red squares indicate the most significant events, yellow less significant, and green squares are the least significant events. The detection algorithm is applied independently to each video so red squares in one video may not have the same event significance as those in a different video.
Sudden sound events do not need to be loud to be detected by the algorithm. The sound of a car blinker or a sudden voice can stand out against the background if the background is quiet enough. This could be either desirable or undesirable depending on what the user is looking for in the audio track. Event detection algorithm will continue to be refined based on user feedback.
- [Windows] Added new option to control whether Map, Dashboard, Graph, and Control Center windows are hidden when DCV is put in background.
- [Windows] Dashcam Viewer is now a 32-bit application for increased compatibility with users’ systems.
Bug Fixes:
- [Windows] Fixed bug in street address lookup when creating a geotag. The request for street address was failing due to the OpenSSL DLLs not being present in the app directory.
- [Windows] Fixed bug in which Check for New Version didn’t work (same issue as above).
- [Windows] Fixed the issue where the video window would occasionally become black until the video was un-paused.
- [Windows] Fixed bug in window export to JPG/PNG toolbar function that would produce black images.
- Fixed bug in Garmin 45 reader that resulted in incorrect lat/lon values.
- Fixed occasional bug in timeline when videos are enabled/disabled.
- Fixed issue in which GPS data in Transcend DrivePro 230 videos of 5-minutes would not be found. This is a temporary fix.
- Embedded subtitle formats: No longer require the videos to have uppercase .MOV or .MP4 extensions.
Dashcam Viewer 3.4.0 running on Windows 10 with 4K display
Dashcam Viewer is PC/Mac software that allows you to playback your dashcam’s videos while simultaneously viewing your vehicle’s location on a map. There are many other features in the software which are detailed on our website (http://dashcamviewer.com). The free version is fully-functional and allows the loading of up to 2 videos at a time.
I’m really interested in buying this and was waiting for the 3.3.1 to 3.4.0 upgrade–I was hoping it would add support for HEVC/h265 videos from my Viofo A129 Pro. It still does not support those videos and it does not work with Dark Mode on macOS Catalina 10.15.3.
Good questions. Dashcam Viewer uses the Quicktime video library backend for playing videos. Currently the Quicktime media layer doesn’t support the new(ish) HEVC/H265 format so these videos won’t play in DCV either. I recommend switching to the H264 encoder since the difference in video quality is marginal and it’s more compatible with older systems.
In regards to Dark Mode, I had to make a choice as to whether I drop users who are running older OS’s like macOS 10.10 and 10.11, or provide Dark Mode to macOS 10.12+ users. I chose, for now, to preserve compatibility with the older system. I have a prototype of DCV that supports Dark Mode (DM is pretty cool!) and is Apple “Notarization compatible”, but it requires macOS 10.14+. At some point I will make that the new baseline and drop old OS compatibility. Just not ready yet.
Is there a possibility of using something like ffmpeg for the backend which plays HEVC fine?
I studied that option a few years ago and for technical and LOE reasons it just wasn’t feasible. My guess (hope?) is that the 3rd-party video libraries I’m using now will evolve to support HEVC and other new formats as time goes on.
I started off using 4k h264 but I was getting continual playback skipping with anything that used Quicktime as the video source (Preview, Dashcam Viewer, etc) but it worked in VLC and ffmpeg without issue. My late-2013 Macbook Pro does not support hardware decoding 4k and HEVC but it can do it fine via software decoders. It does not do the same skipping behavior for 4k h265 videos and I can play them in Preview smoothly; it just doesn’t play back in Dashcam Viewer for some reason. In either scenario, it plays in VLC or ffmpeg fine without skipping.