Coping with split video recordings

Hej Antti and fellow racers,

how do you cope with video file size limits?

RaceChrono is splitting my recordings into multiple video files, like GoPro and others do as well, for some reasons I am aware of. Those file sizes max out just below 1900 MiB, at about 1.992.xxx.xxx Bytes size. That so, I assume this has nothing to do with any filesystem-driven limits (like 4 GiB for FAT32) etc., but comes from either RaceChrono or the phone's OS resp. its camera API. (Results are the same irrespective of which camera API I set in expert options.)

Previously, with another phone (OnePlus), I did not really notice or care, as no gap between files was noticeable after merging them, for example by exporting into overlaid videos. After changing to a different model that is quicker in general (Huawei), I am facing gaps of about four to five seconds between video files. Which fairly annoys me, as I'm not lapping quickly enough on the Nordschleife to get a gapless 4K video. ;-)

The gap length seems to be independent of image size (like 2160p vs 1080p), almost suggesting it's not due to underperforming I/O.

What could be done to minimise those gaps, or, disable video file splitting at all?

Cheers,
Philipp

Comments

  • edited October 2018
    Hi @shg,

    This hasn't come up before, but you're absolutely correct. There is a couple of things going on here:

    1) RaceChrono leaves a purposeful delay between stopping recording and starting again. This is because some phones just crash if there's no delay. The delay is one second plus the time that it actually takes to restart the recording. But as the one second is negligible compared to the 4-5 second delay you're experiencing, trimming down the 1s delay to absolute minimum, like 300ms, would not help much...

    2) Android phones used to limit maximum recording size to 2-4 GB, and RaceChrono used to rely on that. At some point the limitation was lifted, and also RaceChrono started recording unlimited size video files for a while before I noticed. So it got "fixed" at some point of 2018. The reason for me wanting the videos to be split, is that it is much easier to handle the smaller pieces, and maybe delete the ones you don't need. Now for this, an expert setting could be created. It would not work on all the phones though. Added to my TO-DO list.
  • Thank you for giving some background on this. I'm looking forward to test new options.
  • Hey, do you have this planned for a specific release already?

    Cheers

  • Hi, this is currently marked for v6.1, but it depends as there always can be complications and other trouble :)
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