Dashcam installed Today
 

A couple of people asked for pictures - so thought i'd stick them in a new thread rather than them getting lost in the other.

Dashcam and Power Plus box installed in the XC90 today by CBS in Cambridge.

Very tidy install.

https://s23.postimg.org/efdyrlqqj/IMG_7657.jpg

https://s23.postimg.org/up44ui1ej/IMG_7661.jpg

View from the drivers seat...

https://s23.postimg.org/4saghvxqz/IMG_7666.jpg

& A quick video to show the view from the position it's mounted in...

+ YouTube Video

Not sure what a dealer would have charged but I paid £40 + VAT which I think is reasonable as it took them a full hour.

Thanks very much for the photos and videos - good to see the footage from an XC90 itself! Can I go one step further and ask for a night time video whenever you get a chance :)

Did you choose the location of the dashcam on the windscreen, or leave them to place it? I would have tried to put it higher up and to the left of the Intellisafe housing... but no idea if this is feasible in practice or not.

Also, have you considered a rear dashcam?

Finally, was the power box (or whatever its called) hidden out of sight?

Yep - i'll put up a night vid when I get the chance. Wont be tonight as i'm just polishing the remainder of a nice bottle of red :err:

In terms of the positioning, I always place them myself. It's 3M adhesive, so one shot to get it right so I always make sure it's somewhere I am happy with. I played with the position for a little while, and because the lens is really wide any closer to anything and you get incursion into the picture of the intellisafe housing or other parts of the car so this was the closest I could get with a clear unobstructed view.

The Marcus 4 model in the range films in 21:9 aspect ration (which I prefer) and may be easier to place.

The Vico Power Plus box is hidden with the fuse box so completely out of sight. Set and forget. It has numerous options on it, but once it's in it's nothing something I need to mess with.

Hah! Watched your dash cam footage for a bit but got more drawn into listening to the stuff about aeroplanes :)

Haha!! It's the APG podcast - http://airlinepilotguy.com - it's a great show.

Pretty much the sole reason for ordering Apple Car Play on the XC90.

Thanks very much, good to see one mounted in an XC90 for real.

Just on your recompression job, it looks like the bitrate's a little low, quite a lot of blocking on the 1080p stream on that YT vid. Depending on what codec it is (h.264?) you might want to up it to 25mbit/s or so.

Google re-compress vids using their VP9 codec and it seems to introduce additional artefacts. Any vid I've posted on YouTube in HD looks worse than my original.

Yep, YT recompress and it will look slightly worse than the original but the blocking on the video above goes a level beyond that and I'd hazard a guess that the intermediate format used was a low bitrate.

But I freely admit to being a digital video nerd. It's my job :)

The end result looks great.

I do like the videos that dash cams produce - There is something quite cool about documenting the little things that you might see on the road.

However.... I'm not sure I'd ever get used to the size of the dash cam in the middle of the screen - Do you notice it much when you are driving?

Can't see it from the drivers seat - it's entirely hidden behind the rear view mirror!