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How I fixed dash cam playback choppiness with ffmpeg

Joined
Jan 27, 2025
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Location
Austin, TX
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R1S
Just got my R1S delivery recently and was very disappointed with playback issues from dash cam videos. I had copied videos off the SSD to my local m3 MacBook for playback. Multiple players, video editing software, all choppy as hell on a system that otherwise has no problem editing 4k video.

Asking Claude (Anthropic's AI LLM) about the issue, it had me run some debug commands using ffmpeg and came up with a diagnosis that there is only one keyframe every second as well as the bitrate being on the low end for the given resolution.

It gave me a reencode command to double the amount of keyframes:


ffmpeg -i 03_07_25_131726_frontCenter_001.mp4 -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -g 15 -keyint_min 15 output.mp4

And that worked like a charm. Playback is now butter smooth with no loss in quality. The generated file is a bit larger though.

I had only seen complaints about this issue and hadn't come across a posted fix myself so posting here in case this is useful to anyone else.


Rivian R1T R1S How I fixed dash cam playback choppiness with ffmpeg Screenshot 2025-03-08 at 10.01.32 AM
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