BMW drive recorder processor

This tool provides some features to process BMW drive recorder recordings.

Motivation

The BMW drive recorder App in iDrive 8.0 and 8.5 cars creates low quality recordings of all 4 external cameras (if the car is fitted with them at least) and a Metadata-file containing speed, date, time and location. This app works as a dashcam replacement, but the exported files are not very useful to humans, as metadata and recording are seperated.

Processing

In order to make the recordings more useful, this tool provides a few features to process these recordings. This tool is basically a user friendly interface for ffmpeg with a additional subtitle generator. It works by creating a subtitles.ass file from the Metadata.json file and writing a ffmpeg command containing all complex filters needed.

Features:

• Converts drive recorder .ts files into any video-format supported by ffmpeg
• Adds the following metadata (or additional information) to a output video:
  • Name of the driver
  • Name of the car
  • Camera titles (front, rear, left and right)
  • Current speed
  • Acceleration (calculated from speed changes between frames)
  • GPS location (long. and lat.)
  • Date and time
• Frame interpolation to increase framerate
• Splitting the one video into different files for each camera
• Flipping the rear camera image, as it is mirrored by default
• Trimming the video
• Upscale video
• Save last settings

Requirements:

• ffmpeg binary compiled with --enable-libass in your PATH or next to this tools executeable
• .NET 8.0 runtime
• A BMW with iDrive 8.0 or 8.5 including the drive recorder app

Missing features/known bugs

• There is next to no error-handling
• The tool creates a log-file if ffmpeg finishes with an error, but it will not write the output of ffmpeg into it
• Acceleration value seems to be correct but is quite useless due to it's fast changes. (Maybe add a acceleration graph underneath the video?)
• As I only have a iDrive 8.5 BMW i4 from 2023, I don't know if Metadata-files are identical in iDrive 9, iDrive 7 and so on.
• On small screens, the window is too large
• Subtitles are generated for every camera when the video is split
• Video Resolution is fixed. Has to be fixed.