How I Fixed my R1S Dash Cam Playback Choppiness with ffmpeg

wildlife R1T · 2025-04-03T14:11:49+00:00

I have previously used the streaming capability back when it first came out as well as the hotspot since before Connect+ was a thing. I am trying to get the streaming working again but it seems to have been hidden fully behind the paywall. (Not looking to argue the merits of that system here) I recall after Connect+ came out being able to still use the Hotspot while tethering with my phone, and losing it isn't a big deal other than needing to update my wife's wifi, but I think I remember needing to be on the Hotspot to do casting. My question is, did Rivian remove both of these features to fully behind the connect+ paywall? I thought that if you used phone tethering or if you were connected to WIFI you could use most all of the usual streaming like features of the Rivian? If anyone can recommend how to stream while using tethering I'm sure myself and others without Connect+ would appreciate it.

Rivian Mom

Active Wheeler

Mar 9, 2025

#1

I've had some recent playback issues from dash cam videos with my R1S. I had copied videos off the SSD to my local m3 MacBook for playback. Multiple players, video editing software, all was really choppy 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.