Is the DashCam feature normally this low-quality?

[Akikiki]

I used the black connector behind the speaker grille. Nothing new. I was one of the first folks to discover we could use it back in 2013. I apologize up front, but I''m not going to re-invent the wheel here trying to explain it. Here is one of the best TeslaTap guide for helping you. But there's dozens now of Youtube videos that will help you too. If you follow down through Teslatap's guide, he will link you to the blue colored mate connnector for that gracefully fits the car's black connector. Teslatap has an ebay link with the material necessary to tap that source.

 

[sceptic]

Do you happen to have an example of this?

Not easily I'm out of the country at the moment but there are 1000's of video's all over here and youtube showing much better quality than what u have. Have u asked Tesla cs to look at it?

 

[camalaio]

Keep in mind what we get recorded is not the raw camera footage. The AP system has a chip dedicated for MPG encoding (lacking in AP 2.0 which is why they don't have the dashcam feature). This chip greatly reduces the quality and adds a lot of compression artifacts in order to make the file sizes manageable. What's fed to the NN for processing should be much clearer.

I had a 4K dashcam and discovered it was pointless. It so heavily compressed the video, the compression artifacts made it impossible to read a license plate even when directly in front of the car! Lowering it to 1080P allowed it to keep the quality well enough that it was then much more usable. A good quality dashcam will do a good job of video compression. Sadly that's not the case with Tesla, but at least it's better then nothing and super easy to install!

Fair enough about us not getting raw footage, but very compressed.

I laugh about your 4k camera experience, but only because I think 4k is a bit too much hype right now and this is exactly what happens. Everything I can stream to my 4k TV is pointless versus 1080p because the bitrate isn't sufficiently more to actually improve the quality, much like your dashcam experience!

Yup- greentheonly has posted the 2 different types of footage showing a big difference in quality... start here and a buncha more info following the first tweet- only item of note is he says the dashcam stuff is maxxing out node B on the NVIDIA HW2.x AP computer... which suggests they might be able to offer much higher dashcam quality on HW3 once they stop running emulated 2.x code on it.

green on Twitter

Ah, great info in this link. So the cameras do see much better than is recorded (that's... very good ).

I suppose they are compressing so much so that multiple streams can make it over the USB 2.0 interface without introducing large gaps. Clearly a lot more can be done but it's a low-priority feature while they have many others to get to, and I'm fine with that.

Im curious why 95% of the videos (though not ones shown here) have such a strong green hue. Perhaps Tesla grades the videos that way for its recognition algo.

It's not for the actual AP operations (as noted above, that's a different pipeline -- we only see the very compressed video for recording purposes), but yes the odd colors have been very recognizable. Dash cam compilations on YouTube.... can tell a Tesla cam immediately from the colour cast!

Not easily I'm out of the country at the moment but there are 1000's of video's all over here and youtube showing much better quality than what u have. Have u asked Tesla cs to look at it?

Honestly, I've seen a lot of ones just as bad? I haven't made a service request because I don't want to complicate their already backed-up service situation with a request about a feature they'll likely just say something along the lines of "Yeah it's a beta feature, it's within spec".

 

[SMAlset]

I don’t recall seeing flickering on my recordings like on your videos OP. Almost seems like something is loose.

One of the positive features of still using the TeslaCam/Sentry mode is the view you get along the side of your car on the outside. Many perps have already actually been caught keying the side; door dings etc. also show the action. Traditional dashcam won’t capture that—just view from inside the car out at window level. Many people have received favorable insurance verdicts because of those repeater cameras recording or even seen arrests made for vandalism to the side of their cars. If the action isn’t seen, they can always argue any damage happened before or after you are alleging it happened. Just something to think about in case you are thinking of not using the car’s system.

With the rear camera turned on now you might not be able to read a plate from a distance but if someone rear ends you, you do capture the action and assuming they have a plate on the front of their car, the plate is readable before they hit you. I checked this out on cars behind me in a drive thru to see what could be made out and felt the plates could be read just fine.

 

[SMAlset]

We have a Blackvue 900S-2 channel on our MS. My husband wanted to see when or if a delivery was made just they other day (pkg was misdelivered and not to our house although tracking said it was). Since car was parked in driveway and Parking mode activated on the dashcam, he went to check files. He was lamenting that the 900 being 4K doesn’t record continously in Parking mode unlike it did with our previous 650S. You’ll find + and - s with any system. TeslaCam at least presently is recording continously to buffer when Sentry mode is active and the Sentry recorded events that get transferred from the buffer cover 10 minutes from all 4 cameras which has its advantages too.

 

[Davidss2]

I have a comma.ai aftermarket autonomous system on one of my other cars. It's video is also a little strange looking just like the tesla. I know the comma.ai developers have said that the video is filtered in such a way as to make it easier for the computer to understand and that is the reason it looks a little funny.