Veho Muvi DV Camcorder

Results Continued

All that needed to be done was to rotate it 180 degrees. Instead, you either have to risk damaging or dirtying the lens or awkwardly holding an already fiddly device. Granted, it does feel nice and solid, but you wouldn’t fancy its chances being dropped in the kind of outside environment at which the Muvi is marketed as being able to handle.

The picture quality isn’t anything to write home about, although the video compression deals with motion well – insofar as frames don’t tend to blur and instead produce a wobbling ripple effect during camera-motion. Resolution is up to 640×480 with the frame-rate touted as 30fps. However, the frame-rate has an unpleasant tendency to drop horribly when recording objects in rapid motion. The images aren’t distorted, but we are talking only 5-10 frames per second.

Sound quality is also poor. Clipped on to the collar or hung around the neck using the included “neck-chain” – which is a cord and not a chain – the microphone has obviously been positioned so it ruffles against the clothing. Which leads to terrible clicks, crackles and pops that make the video painful to listen to and obscure whatever you may have been attempting to record. So much so in fact that several videos were tested on mute or very low volume to prevent possible damage to speakers (and ears).

When mounted stationary, however, the sound quality was better. It still distorted badly when recording loud acoustic guitar, but it would manage fine with mid-range volumes or the spoken word. Sound is only recorded at 8,000Hz and constitutes a measly 1% of the overall file-size (according to the GSpot Codec Information Appliance). So it’s clear audio is not this device’s focus.

When attached to a PC using the provided USB to mini-USB cable the Muvi can be used as a standard webcam. Plugging it in and turning it on initially causes the computer to recognise it as a standard mass storage device. Flicking the “VOX” – voice activation – switch changes this to a standard webcam signal. Installing the drivers for this was a little tricky, though. Each stage took two identical tries before producing different, desired results.

The Veho website provides backups of the User Manual (in .PDF) and the driver CD (in .ZIP), but using the included video capture software is a case of pure trial and error as no instructions are included anywhere. The User Manual includes little more than a table describing their system of coloured indicator LEDs, a brief guide to general operation, and some basic technical details.

This is a huge shame because it gives no indication of why exactly it is impossible to record sound when set up as a webcam. Since there’s no support forum, either, this function is bafflingly denied us. You are able to select audio sources from your soundcard, but not the Muvi’s microphone itself. Which is very odd because it records sound just fine as a stand-alone DV camera.

Even separate audio sources only work when using third party video capture software and are always out of sync with the video stream, except with very short clips. Bizarrely, despite all the options set up accordingly, Veho’s proprietary video capture program never records an audio stream. It’s not that it’s garbled or uses an unsupported format, it simply isn’t there.

Price

The SRP at Veho.co.uk is £79.99, but for some reason everything there is ridiculously overpriced. You can find it in the £50-60 range elsewhere quite easily through Google or specialised online price comparison websites.

2 responses to “Veho Muvi DV Camcorder”

  1. a real disappointment. very poor sound. shaky picture results. biggest problem is that it stops without out any reason. I think I’m recording something and find I only got 2 or 3 minutes. it doesn’t keep doing 30 minutes segments as the docs say,

  2. Yep I pretty much concur with all you’ve said in your review. I’ve used this on a Mac, so can’t test the web cam software, but I’m not missing much.
    The sound is a real let down. Basically unusable even as a voice track. Ugh.
    However as tinycam it’s not bad.

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