BLblipmusic·Sep 20, 2018
Considering this is HN, does anyone have any input on the latest GoPros vs Garmin Virb Ultra 30, specifically in terms of telemetry formats vs general camera quality? Garmin seems to be the data king here, but I'm curious as to whether the GoPro is perhaps the better camera, and if so, whether this could offset the differences between the data formats.
I should note that the telemetry is important for our usage, GPS logs especially.
We have two Ultra 30s at work (used in humid areas, mostly at walking speed) and with GPS turned on (obligatory) and 1440p/30fps video we get 90-110mins of continuous footage before the battery is completely drained. Longer battery life would be nice and every now and then we get hiccups/glitches (looks like frames are skipped) with the setting above. Doesn't invalidate the footage in any way and it's rare, bu
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t still annoying. Could be a firmware bug, really. Audio is so-so, but that is to be expected (we haven't tried external microphones yet, since the setup needs to be as simple as possible).
Would a GoPro help with any of the above or is it a similar experience in terms of battery etc? If anything, the GoPro seems more rugged (for our needs, the Virb needs a case). What about video quality? Interface? (I did read DC Rainmaker's comparison[0] which was what made us choose the Virb, together with the fact that there's an SDK for FIT and at the time of purchase GoPro didn't have a Github repo[1])
GoPro's GPMF data is embedded within the video file, whereas Garmin's FIT[2] format is separate and is logged to whether one is recording or not as long as the camera is turned on. Both have their pros and cons, FIT seemingly being the more flexible format (it's basically a big timeline with events attached) but one also needs to identify what part of the data stream corresponds to which video session and it's not as "linear" to read as GPMF (?). In FIT every single logged coordinate is also timestamped (10Hz GPS), whereas it seems that you only get one timestamp/second for GPMF coordinates (18Hz GPS).
I wrote a little parser to extract and integrate the relevant telemetry data elsewhere and have started looking at doing the same for GPMF (I wanted to write it from scratch in a language I'm learning). Since I have no recent GoPro at hand it's been difficult finding raw samples for the GoPro, other than the GPFM GitHub repo - youtube won't suffice since I need the original video with the telemetry intact.
[0]: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/03/best-action-cam-2017-gop...
[1]: https://github.com/gopro/gpmf-parser
[2]: SDK here https://www.thisisant.com