Viofo VS1 DashCam

Bought one. Tiny. No screen. If this works out, I might get another for the rear.
Originally was going to do the Fitcamx, but got cold feet over the way it gets power from Safety Sense and warranty.
Going to try to just plug it into existing USB-C power outlets.
We'll see.
LINK

 

Pretty small:

 

I went with Viofo because I had two A119's, I believe two cars ago. I'll be darned if I know what I did with them.
Plus, I never really used the screens except to aim the things.
I ordered another one-I think I'm going to try the rear one first.
There seems to be just enough cable to reach the rear passenger usb ports.
They won't be 'integrated', but maybe some redundancy is good.
My plan this time is not to go to extremes to hide the wiring, so no grommet or headliner fishing, if I can help it.
They come with 32 gb cards. Not sure if that's big enough. Last time I got snookered with a counterfeit, so you can't go with lowest bidder, lol.

 

I was heading out the door to drive to the golf course for my walk, and was just going to test fit the camera. One thing led to another, lol. I dropped the wire down from tucked behind the weatherstripping to the unit. I ran the wire to the side and then down, under the rear seat and hence to a passenger usb outlet. Excess cable under the rear seat. Very quick and easy to do...or undo.

With the rake of the rear window, I'm not sure if the whole assembly is that noticeable. The hanging cord might annoy me looking in the rear view mirror, but I could get over that. An added twist in the wire could bring it up some. Perhaps an elastic....

The wire on the side by the rear seat isn't noticeable, unless you look, of course. And then there's the wire on the floor behind the console. Again, not a big deal.

I have to re-aim so as to not get as much sky. Also, the heat trace lines obscure, perhaps.

Time stamp on files is GMT, from the unit's GPS, so the app will fix that, by assigning a time zone.

At some point I guess I'll do a deep format on my 256 cards, which did see a lot of duty. In meanwhile, see how the 32 gb does.

Next up, the app, lol.

Then the front camera. That'll be harder...maybe. Maybe not.

edit: The unit slides off easily from the gps base, which is affixed to the window. So, like the A119, I take the entire unit off, being careful not to smudge or change the angle of the lens, bring it inside and plug into the usb port on the camera. Annoying that the cable supplied has a usb A end on it, whereas the Gen5 has usb C ports. While I was at Staples returning the other dash cam, I bought a couple of overprice Sosche adapter plugs.

 

The Viofo app is fine. Did most stuff inside. As I said, goes on and off the GPS base easily. Aiming the camera with the app required turning off CarPlay-apparently it uses WiFi, in some manner. I'll have to fine tune when I'm out and about somewhere flat, as in a parking lot.

My MacBook Pro didn't like the Viofo Player, so I think I'm going to go with DashCam Viewer, to look at videos with an accompanying map. The trial version seems to work. I used to do that some with my previous cams. It was fun. $75 worth of fun, I don't know.

I twisted the lead from the weatherstrip to the unit and that seemed to suck the cable up some with the hatch closed.

Next up is the front installation.

Then sorting out the memory cards.

edit: As far as I can tell, there's no 'off' switch on these things. Pulling the plug out of the handy USB-C ports is easy. This could be a factor especially with the included 32GB card. One minute of default video takes 150MB, so maybe 20 minutes before it gets overwritten. Who knows what the voice command 'lock video' actually results in?