SVAT CVP800 Mini Portable DVR Digital Video Recorder with MPEG4 Compression

I purchased the SVAT CVP800 with the CCDCO camera. After some minor initial bumps, I am very satisfied. When first received, the camera had a defective video cable. It took a while for me to figure out the problem, but once done, SVAT customer service was very responsive and sent a replacement cable immediately. The only significant negative comments that I have are that the CVP800 does not include or offer as an optional accessory a 12VDC plug-in car power supply; also the instruction manual is not very helpful in several areas. On the positive side, the CVP800 is extremely small (easily fits into a shirt pocket), light weight and consumes very little power (under 1.5 watt). It has a powerful feature not found on other similar mini-portable units that I evaluated, specifically, the ability to loop record, i.e., continuously record, writing over the oldest data when it reaches the capacity of the SD card. This allows the unit to record 24 hours a day forever without any attention whatsoever. If an event happens that you are aware of and want to review and save, simply stop the recorder and selectively play back the last minutes/hours recorded, and if you want to, download the data onto your computer to save it or simply pull the SD card with the recorded data, and insert a new one in the CVP800. Overall, I have found this unit to be well designed user friendly, easy to understand, and highly flexible in both recording and playing back. The only reason I gave the CVP800 a 4-star rating (rather than 5-stars) is the absence of an out-of-the-box way to power the unit in a car other than depending on the internal AA batteries.

There's no other DVR of it's type that I could find. I have it in my glove box wired to a forward seeing sony lipstick cam and microphone for insurance reasons. I set this thing to record at full frames full fps and to always record when powered. So it only records when I have the key in the ignition and save about 3 hours worth on a 2GB card. Hasn't failed me yet.

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Seems to work okay but it breaks up the video into ~10 second pieces when recording HQ (708X480?)@12 FPS. This is about an MByte. These files can be stitched together if you want to play them back with software, such as MS Movie Maker, but is a pretty big PIA.

It would be nice to find a file on your SD memory stick that started when you pushed the record button and ended when you pushed stop.

It would also be nice if it could use 12V.

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Once I figured out how to work it, it works well. The directions are really useless. I still haven't really got the motion detection thing figured out, but it does work. The pictures are not the best but they do serve there purpose. I think if I had looked around a little more I could have found something a little better, but all in all it does its job.

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I've owned two of these for 3 years one in each car. They loop-record anytime the car is in motion. I installed a GPS-overlay box between my forward-facing camera (mounted on my rear-view mirror) and the DVR. This imprints my speed on the video. The insurance this provides against he-said she-said accidents, inaccurate laser guns (check out my youtube video), or rogue police who say one thing on the side of the road, and another in court is priceless.

All co-workers have these installed after seeing how it reveals how 'unimpeachable, trustworthy, and honest' police officer testimony is anything but...

I don't go looking for trouble. It finds me. When it does, it's great to have an unbiased witness ready to come to my defense.

Note: If your state is a two-party consent state, you'll need to warn anyone within audio recording distance that they're being recorded. Otherwise, at best it's inadmissible, or at worst, you could be charged with felony wire-tap offenses. I solved this problem by applying small (3" x 1") red warning labels in the corner of all roll-down windows. They look like alarm stickers, but state "Notice: Any conversations inside and within 6' of this vehicle may be recorded".

I would have given it 5 stars, but I have two annoyances:

1) The A/V in/out jacks are nothing more than a 4-contact 3.5mm stereo jack. In humid environments the internal contacts become 'dirty' causing flicker in the video if the cables are bumped.

2) The video is actually split into multiple 1 1.5MB asf files. They can be spliced back together, but there is about a 2-4 frame loss at each seam. It's barely noticeable, but it is an annoyance. I imagine this has to be the case as the files must be completed and saved before power loss. If the power is turned off, whatever file is being written is corrupt. Each segment is about 4-6 seconds long. So you lose the last few seconds of record when you turn off the car.

Because of the age of mine, I do not have a firmware update option under the SD section of the menu. I have an email into svat to see if there is a work-around. For now, my max SD size is 4GB (non-SDHC).

If you want to see videos of how this works in a car, look up my username on utube.