DVR 4 Car Review – A Third Eye on the road when you need it most
App Type: Uncategorized
Our rating: 
By: MoonLake Apps
Version #: 1.1
Date Released: 2013-01-04
Developer: MoonLake Apps
Price: 1.99
User Rating:
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Have you ever been on the road and saw something interesting? You wish you could go back in time and take a picture, but you were too busy making sure that jerk in the slow lane didn’t cut you off. Sure you could leave a camera recording all the time and you wouldn’t miss a thing, but the cost in memory cards would make you too broke to drive anywhere.
DVR 4 Car works like a DVR on your TV. It records up to a certain amount of video and then dumps the older video in favor of the new. Think of it as a revolving reel of the last ten minutes. When you stop recording you are left with a copy that you can import into your photo stream to upload, archive, or edit. The magic is in the lack of interface. You don’t have to do anything to manage the video being recorded. DVR 4 Car takes care not to fill up your iOS device’s storage. A full ten minute video on an iPhone 5 should run you a little under 2GBs.
That sounds great, but then when you see something you want to record (traffic accident, crazy person on the sidewalk, famous monument) you would have to stop the video and start it again to make sure you had a ten minute chunk saved with your footage. If the desired moment was only a few minutes, then that is a lot of wasted footage to capture it. DVR 4 Car’s answer to that is the large star button in the corner of the screen. Tapping that (while driving safely of course) will create a separate file containing the last two minutes and the next two minutes which gives you a bite sized chunk that should include whatever it is you saw.
Outside of recording, DVR 4 Car is quite sparse with features. You can merge clips and send them to your photo’s app, but there isn’t any sharing abilities which for some uses (recording a run in with a law enforcement agent) you might want the ability to automatically upload favorited clips. There also isn’t any way to adjust the amount of time recorded, either in the rolling record, or your stared videos. Despite this, DVR 4 Car is a easy to use app that found make for a fun project on your next road trip.
Quick Take
Value:Fair.
Would I Buy Again:Maybe.
Learning Curve:Super easy.
Who Is It For:Anyone who likes to record things while driving.
What I Like:Easy to use interface reduces distractions.
What I Don't Like:No auto uploading or sharing features, no adjustable recording settings.
Final Statement:Why miss the next big thing you pass on the road, just star it and forget about it.
driving Features:
• Records constantly but uses only limited amount of your storage space
• The selected stored footages are time stamped with a start time equal to the stream time when they were captured
• Managing the stored footages is simple: different fragments can be combined into one video clip, time stamped, saved in photo album or transferred to a computer via iTunes.
• Distraction free operation
• Please remember that safe driving is your highest priority. This app will not require from you any actions while you are driving. You can tap the “star” button when it's safe to do so.
Screenshots
Article By Nathan Kline
Nathan has been an avid Apple user and advocate since the days of the Apple ][. He has always sought to find new ways to make use of technology to assist his daily life. As a paramedic in southern California Nathan brings his familiarity with technology to the field, and at whatsoniphone.com he brings his critical thinking to he analysis of apps and news. You has also written app reviews for the mobile app site Smokinapps.com.
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