Installation and Performance
When it comes to performance there are a few different aspects that we need to touch on. There is the installation experience, software, and then of course the actual performance as well. With that in mind, we might as well start with the installation to get things going. You can have a Dashcam professionally installed and Vantrue even has it as an option in the accessories listing on their website for people in New York. On top of that, you can use the base kit for your installation, plugging it directly into the DC power/cigarette lighter port and running your wires just all over the place and initially, I did this install because I didn’t think I would have time to get things installed better before our vacation. But just a day before we left I found the time to sneak out and work on things. There are a few things you have to do to get things installed. You need to run the rear camera wire from the front to the back of your car/truck/van, you have to mount both the front and rear cameras, and then you get power to the main front camera. Vantrue gives you a wipe to clean the location you are going to mount then a fresh tempered glass screen protector to install first that you then mount the camera to. This should make removing it later easier and isn’t going to damage anything which can be especially important in the rear with rear defrost lines. They do ask that you not install on those lines, but as you can see in the pictures below, in our 2016 Buick Regal the lines go all the way up to the top so that wasn’t an option. The rear camera also doesn’t have the adjustability that the front mount has, you can tilt both of its cameras up or down but if you are twisted things are going to be sideways and there isn’t any fixing that. That said the rear camera mounted quickly and you can see the Type-C cable running out of the side from it. I, like most people, ran the rear camera cable through the headliner but I do wish this end of the cable had a 45-degree connection or even a 90-degree connection. With it going straight in, the cable is hard to deal with, and because this is an especially thick cable it fights back. In the third picture, you can see that the cable is still hanging down slightly even now and it drives me crazy.
Thankfully the front camera at least has the rear camera connection on the top so the thick cable and straight connection weren’t an issue here. I still wasn’t a fan of that connection going directly to the camera, but I will talk about that more later. For this camera, they suggest it on the driver's side which for me at least put it right up in my face so I ended up going with to the right of the rearview mirror. This car has lane and break warnings and with that, the sensors are all right behind the mirror or I would have tried to just hide it behind the mirror except for the inside-facing camera. I was really worried that even this location would be too in the way but as it turned out, it worked well and hasn’t been an issue. The mount is installed easily on the tempered glass mounting location. From there I just had to get the cables hooked up. I had already run the rear camera cable so that went along the outside edge up under the headliner and dropped down. I ended up doing the same with the hardware kit as well.
Vantrue provided both of their hardware kits and I went in planning on using the fuse jumper-style kit because that would be the least noticeable in the future. Sadly though it only took one look at the fuse block to know that the jumpers wouldn’t fit, there just wasn’t much height clearance or clearance around the outside edges as well. So I had to change my plan and go with the OBD II plug kit. I pulled the side panel of the driver's side dash off and that gave me space to route the cable from the OBD II port up to the driver's side A-pillar, this would let me get the cable up to the headliner. From there I started at the Nexus 5 itself and ran the cable and dropped it down into the side of the dash. Then on the other end, I plugged in the OBD II plug and ran all of the extra cable into the side of the dash as well. I had enough room to mount the voltage safety box here and to also zip tie up all of the extra cable length so it is out of the way.
With the installation out of the way, I did need to get my settings dialed in. You shouldn’t need to play with settings much, but you will have to use the app often to view footage so this is going to be a big part of your Nexus 5 experience. First up I did get a few pictures of the menu navigation when using the dashcam directly. The four buttons function similarly to how a monitors menu will work, the left button is the okay button when in the menu, you have left and right navigation, then a back button to take you back a layer in the menu. The initial setup will prompt you things like your language, wifi frequency settings, preferred date and time formats, time zone, and more.
The first time you connect to the Nexus 5 with the Vantrue app you will be prompted for any firmware updates.
So the app has some functionality even when you aren’t connected to the dashcam directly. The landing page you will end up on when you open the app, it shows you any Vantrue devices that you have and gives you the option to add one or connect to a device. Down at the bottom though you also have the album page, store, and about pages that work without being connected. The store just lets you pick your region and open up different online stores to shop for more Vantrue products. The About page has app-specific settings like dark or light mode. The album is where you are going to be at most of the time. When not connected, this is where you can see any downloaded video, events, or photos. When you click connect it will reach out via Bluetooth and then connect over wifi. I wish you didn’t have to be so close to access this. I would find it a lot more useful if I could come home and go inside and because the dashcam is still in parking mode connect then when on the couch or at my desk it would be a lot easier. As it sits you can only connect when sitting in the car. On that same note, I would love it if the dashcam would just connect to my home wifi and let me access that way which would give even more range. I’m just a lot less likely to access files when I have to sit in the car and slowly go through everything. This is fine for an accident, but if someone did something stupid or funny and you wanted to tell your SO, this might be more trouble than you are willing to go through for the 2-minute conversation.
Once connected to the Nexus 5 the landing page has a live view of all of the cameras up top and then at the bottom you have a few controls. There is also a gear in the top right corner that opens up the menu settings and honestly, this is a lot easier to navigate than the on-screen menu, but it does take a little time to get connected. You can full-screen the live view. You have a button that looks like a graph that will open up the mileage and other drive stats which I have included what those look like as well. You get a start time and end time, how much time you were driving and how much was resting, and details like altitude changes, average and max speeds, and more. Back on the main page you can turn the microphone on or off, flip the cameras, take a picture, turn the recording off, and open up the album of footage and pictures directly on the dashcam. That last one you will use a lot, other than pulling the SD card out and plugging it into a PC this is how you will access your footage.
Let’s quickly run through the menu options, there are two pages worth of options with some just being on or off on the main menu. But a lot opens up into another page with even more options. The first important option is what resolution and the number of cameras you want to run. The Nexus 5 has four cameras with the front running at up at up too 1944P by default the front was set to 1440p. You then have three other 1080p cameras as well. The setting I found myself adjusting the most is the G sensor setting page. On that menu page, you can adjust all three axis of the sensor. This will automatically set an event when it senses an impact but I found that especially with the up-down setting it picks up hitting a bump a lot. I have a pothole in my neighborhood, a railroad track nearby, and the parking garage for my wife's work that constantly sets it off, and tweaking that without losing the ability for it to go off if something important happens is a fine line. You can also adjust how long each loop is, this is how long each recording from the Nexus 5 is in file size. You can even go as far as adjusting the exposure on each of the four cameras.
The stamp setting page lets you decide what information is included in your footage. The date and time is important but you may not care about having Vantrue branding for example. The speed setting is also one you might consider removing. If you were to have to use footage from an accident this could also be used against you. The parking mode is how the Nexus 5 functions when you are parked. You can set it up to just keep an eye out for impacts, you can have it record at a low frame rate or low bitrate. What I have been playing with is motion detection. I’m still not sure what the best option is, but ideally, you don’t want it to record endless footage when you are parked, and not recording anything when parked is losing one of the big features offered.
So you can use the main camera buttons for most functions but the two main functions that you may want to change often is turning the inside microphone on or off and letting it know to save a recording. Vantrue does have a wireless remote that can do those two things for you. But if you want, you also can use the voice controls. This took a little while to figure out, but once I found this menu in the settings it was simple. They have listed off everything you can say. You can adjust the sensitivity, but the standard worked well for me. The big one here is “lock the video” and of course off audio and turn on audio would cover the microphone on or off options that the remote offers.
Last up you can change the warning notifications around to turn it off for specific actions if you prefer. There is also a system info page where you can check on the software version on all of the cameras.
With all of the menu out of the way, I’m sure by now you are curious how navigating your footage works. When you open up the album there are three pages in total with tabs up top splitting things up. You can also flip between the SD card and local up top. The main split though is between normal footage, events, and photos. All of the recordings will be on the normal page but only events triggered by the crash protection, parking protection, or manual triggers using the side button or voice controls. Photos are their own thing all together, you can trigger a photo using the voice controls. For events, as long as you don’t have too many false triggers this isn’t going to be too hard to look through but with all four cameras running on the Nexus 5, there are four different files for each 1-3 minute long clip. This gets crazy in the normal folder meaning a LOT of scrolling just to get through today's footage. This could be improved significantly by linking all four of the active camera files together in a way where you don’t have to see them all here and the ability to search by date or time would help too. The best improvement here would be an overall timeline that would let you scroll through by day and time and see activity and events. I love that the Nexus 5 records so much footage, but the idea of even digging back a day or two to check footage is overwhelming if you don’t tag it as an event or if you don’t pull it right away.
When you open up a video from the SD card it will play through and you can fullscreen it. But some of the functionality isn’t available until you download that file to your phone and play it from there. From the SD card you can skip forward or back through files and open the milage stats or down at the bottom you can delete or download the file. When playing a file saved to your phone though you can also see the full GPS information of where you traveled for the entire video and you can cut the file down in size here if needed.
Last up is to talk about the actual video quality that you get with all four of the cameras and we have to break that down into two categories. The front camera and the other three because the front camera is in a class of its own. I put together a video below showing some of the footage and it is easy to spot the front camera footage because it is especially crisp and clear which is exactly what you want. I had no trouble reaching license plates on this footage when driving around as well as seeing a lot that is going on inside of cars as well. For the other three cameras, there is a step-down but they do still perform well. Our rear outside view camera doesn’t look as well but that is because our rear window tint is starting to fail and needs replaced. If not for that, the view would be clear as well. As for the inside cameras, you might be wondering why you would even want or need inside cameras like this. Well, the most obvious answer is anyone who is a gig worker like Uber or Lyft, this gives a good video and recording of anything happening in your car but it would also apply to anyone delivering food or anything else that someone would accuse you of tampering. If that isn’t you, why would you still want the inside cameras? The main one is that these give additional views around your car in case of any situation that comes up. If someone hits you from the side, a front and rear camera isn’t going to catch any of that but you can see those views mostly from both cameras. It can also be helpful in any situation where someone breaks into your car or is messing around on the sides. That said I wouldn’t blame anyone for wanting to turn one or both of those views off, it can be weird to see yourself especially if you are in an accident. Long term, I will most likely turn one of the two interior cameras off and hopefully get our tint fixed so that the view is better.
In the example videos below I show a few mid-day drives and some with the sun causing reflections as well which was an issue mostly on the rearview camera as well. Night footage was solid including just over 24 hours after I set the camera up when we hit a deer just before leaving for vacation. That footage ended up helping when we disputed damage that we found later, our insurance initially declined it because they didn’t think the deer reached that far over but it was clear on the video.
How has the overall experience been? Well, there are a few areas where I would love to change things. Like with the Type-C connection for the rear camera plugging right into the main camera. You have such an easy-to-use magnetic mount to be able to pull it out when you need to and having to mess with that connection messes that up. The size of the rear camera has been great, but I would love to have the cable connection face up to keep the wire out of view. The front camera is larger and would be in the way if I hadn’t put it over on the passenger side. But because of that, there is a small section of all of our front footage that is blocked. I seldom want to navigate using the built-in screen or controls but logging in using the app is still a little slow as well.
