Hey @dcrainmaker long-time fan and reader of your reviews. I saved some time and pulled up your YouTube review, and skipped ahead to the end “Real Talk Time (Recommendations)” of the video. You hit the nail on the head - for $400 it better have stabilization, be easy for me to pull up a single video on my phone, scrub to that moment I want to see, and create a short clip that I can send via text/email. A couple people I ride with have Cycliq and they are constantly complaining that it isn’t working and/or recording.
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Yes. That’s my fear as well. Unless Garmin can address a lot of the shortcoming’s that Ray, Shane, Desfit, etc. have identified with a firmware + app updates, they should (zero chance the will) pull this from the market until they come out with a “working” product
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Plenty of precedent with Garmin (various head units, Vector 3 pedals) that they won’t, but that’s hardly a Garmin problem alone. Wahoo with the Kickr Core and Kickr 2018, for example. Why these companies can’t get their releases right is beyond me.
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I’ve had this issue with my fly12 (original version.) I finally had a minor issue I wanted have video for, and when I went to pull it off I found out that it had been silently not recording at all for the past several months. This to me is an unforgivable fault - to operate apparently normally but not be recording is unacceptable for a safety related device.
I can overlook many faults, but this is the single thing that keeps me from taking a chance on a fly6.
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The one guy complaining the most, well he did get a video of the unlucky day recently that “PK” was on the Wed social ride and accidentally hit a concrete blog and did an end-over. The Cycliq video quality is very good, if you want to see search for “cement blob” on this forum but be prepared its painful to watch the video (within days PK was back riding and is fine). The bumpy video from RCT715 that I saw at the end of DCRainmaker YouTube review looked pretty poor by comparison.
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If my bike is stationary almost anything will set my Varia off, pedestrians etc.
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I reckon is that one major reason why they didn’t fix it because Garmin can’t. Doing software is hard, and you see this a lot with medium-sized companies: it is hard to attract talented software developers and manage software efforts well. Perhaps the people in charge of that project did not know Garmin at one point made cameras with built-in stabilization. Smaller companies like TR can benefit from employees and users that highly identify with the product.
Again, this is just ramblings from someone outside of the industry so take everything with a grain of salt.
Thanks, that’s pretty unanimous in this simple straw poll. What’s odd is that my gen1 would always pick up cars, but rarely any cyclists.
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I have a question: is it possible to embed information like speed, power, date and GPS data as metadata into the video files? Permanently overlaying it onto the video feels a bit like those film cameras that burned time stamps into the film (always in red).
If you just want it as a security camera, I get it. But if I also want to use it for footage during rides or for race footage, I am sure I wouldn’t want that.
PS Yours and @gpl’s reviews are always appreciated.
thx, having owned a gen1 radar I had plugged it into my MacBook upon purchase. Tried again and it has the latest firmware. The gen2 radar appear to be very sensitive as compared the gen1.
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I have been using the new Varia version for more than a week now.
My thoughts:
- I think the product is for someone who is doing most of his/her riding in an enviorment with LOTS of cars on narrow roads or in city. I commute through the city and have a lot of places where cycle lane ends and I have to become part of cars. I have had situations with public transport pushing me to curb and at that point it’s their word against mine. Now I have video proof if needed.
- I haven’t used the unit in low light situations that much. So no opinion.
- Should you buy the product. I don’t know, it depends where you ride and what the traffic is like. The more angry drivers the more you probably need it (again if something happens - your word against theirs).
- Will it save you from getting hit? No.
Both of the reviews bring out all the problems that currently exist, nothing more to add.
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God damn it Garmin. Give us the Edge x40 already.
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I agree. I get all the things you mentioned with mine too. However, whether or not this is useful is a use case thing. I rarely do group rides, and when I do, I turn off the radar because I don’t want it constantly triggering. I DO do road and gravel rides where there are lots of other cyclists though, and I find it very helpful that it tells me when cyclists are coming up behind me, especially as the world changes and fewer and fewer people do the courtesy call out. Ideally, for me, it would trigger on riders or groups approaching, but not on people within the pack on a group ride.
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This broke my heart. I’ve been pining for garmin to do exactly this and was really excited when I heard they DID. My cycliq was replaced twice for getting slightly damp during rides before I gave up on replacing it for the third time (durability and software SUCKS!), but I considered both essential and would actually ride with both the cycliq and the Varia on the seatpost. Sadly, Garmin’s software incompetence overshadows otherwise amazing products. They’re the hewlett-packard of fitness equipment.
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All these are true but awareness is key even if there is 100 cars or just 1. I don’t to not be surprised by a car and also it really helps to just look down to see if a car slowed down as they know you are there. It is then easy to make sure they know you see them and wave them by. Yes I can get hit like you said but I know from using it for 2+ years it is my favorite product ever.
I am kind of temped to put it on my MTB as well just to make it easier to see if someone is coming behind me so I can yield if needed.
Super interesting comments on the DC article with regards to image stabilization concluding with “This encoder will definitely lack any HW acceleration support for electronic image stabilisation.”
Rouleur
Hi Zach,
Modern image stabilisation is done via mitigation of global motion in the image. The methodology you describe is essentially what electronic image stabilisation is, but crucially this might be done at encode time in HW (and HW meaning in the video encoder) vs post processing (SW) of previously encoded pictures.
All modern video encoders (I previously worked 10+ years in video encoder IP design) have motion estimation on the front end to measure and estimate motion from frame to frame in the image. These motion vectors are used to compress the image efficiently. By the same token these motion vectors, when they all act in the same direction, i.e. global motion, can indicate vibration and be mitigated against. This allows the vibration motion to be removed at encode time which not only produces a better output but crucially also leads to a more efficiently coded video sequence as the encoder does not need to encode spurious motion vectors. This is generally what is referred to as HW electronic stabilisation and is available in most modern HW video encoder IP cores.
Image stabilisation can be applied when decoding a previously encoded sequence (we’ll call this SW stabilisation) however this will not produce a decoded output with as high quality an output.
One thing to note however is that if the chipset Garmin is using for the video coding does not support HW electronic image stabilisation then it is not as easy for them to add it.
Based on the stats quoted here 1080p/720p video 30fps, and encoded buffer size of 8.5GB/hr this is a cheap and nasty video encoder chipset from 5-10 years ago! Ray, if you can post a section of the video file fromt he camera I can do some analysis and tell you more!
Rouleur
Hi Ray,
Thanks for those.
I took a look at the files. So this is a pretty early video encoder chipset from Ambarella (who used to supply chips to GoPro before they did their own).
The encode is in AVC/H264 format which is better than Mpeg2 or even MJPEG which some of the cheaper cameras use. However AVC/H264 supports many encode ‘tools’ and this is quite a limited encoder in the way it predicts from previous frames. This is classed as an IP-only (I and P pictures only) encoder which is less sophisticated than an encoder which uses B pictures. The result of this is that the quality for a given bitrate will be lower as compression efficiency is less. This is why the file size is relatively big with a high bitrate of 19.2Mb/s for the given quality.
This encoder will definitely lack any HW acceleration support for electronic image stabilisation.
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How people label the generations of the varia is different, so I’m not saying this is specific to you. And I don’t have time to look up actual version numbers right now. But when the second iteration of the vertical varia was released, Garmin specifically stated that the main difference with it was that it had a more sensitive algorithm. If you have that unit, then the increased sensitivity is by design. Sure it picks up false positives. But I’d rather that then it miss a car. Which would happen before they increased the sensitivity.
Or a shitty screen. Looking at you 1030 
Was bummed to see this released yesterday as I pulled the trigger on an RLT515 a couple months back but this thread is making me feel MUCH better. 
Really disappointed with the lack of support on other head units. I would assume other manufacturers would have an incentive to build something around it (if Garmin lets them) but with these issues, I’m wondering if it’ll be popular enough to justify that.
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- I am guessing you mean the RLT515 or RVR315 since the RCT715 was just released as of yesterday?