Panoview XDV360 Sports Camera (Wi-Fi)

• Overall
• Quality
• Value

works OK standalone; doesn't like cold, and no luck yet with remote access

May 24, 2018

This is basically a GoPro with better resolution and a fisheye lens. (Or more closely, a Fly360.) You can operate it via the buttons, even if it's installed in its waterproof case. I have not tried it under water, but that case seems OK otherwise. The mounting-clamp accessories are a bit subpar quality (but what do you expect for the price). For example when attaching the waterproof case to the clip to put it on my ski helmet, I needed to use washers on the clamp bolt to get it to clamp down tightly, because the bolt is a little too long. I didn't like how the stick-on clip holder fit my helmet (the curved one is not curved enough) so I 3D printed a different design. Then the clip broke when I tried to install it into my holder beause the fit was a little too tight, so I had to 3D print another clip too. After that, I got it mounted well enough to get me through the ski season. I preferred to use it facing forward, that way the video has about the same view as I can see while skiing, but with a much wider angle: you can see my skis and the sky and the forward view and pretty far to the sides, all at once: but it's a circular view, with black areas outside the circles. Here's an example: https://youtu.be/CfiYVtBsaKQ If you have it pointing upwards as suggested, then you get a wonderful high-res view of the sky, with the more distorted areas around the edges being where the interesting stuff is happening. The waterproof case makes that distortion around the edges somewhat worse.
The tripod mount on the bottom is standard, but the plastic side panels pop off too easily so I wouldn't use it for "action cam" purposes without either the waterproof case, or the other cup-shaped holder, which has the plastic GoPro prong mount and also protects the sides of the camera well enough to keep those panels in place.
You need to install a microSD card (not included). It records 15 minutes at a time into each video file and then continues writing another file, so you can easily concatenate them afterwards with your favorite video editing software to make a long video of your adventure. Just remove the microSD card and copy the files off with your laptop or whatever, then edit. The footage is viewable as-is, but I haven't figured out what software to use to transform the circular fisheye view into normal rectangular video (but it would lose too much of the wide angle anyway, if I did). The ideal viewing app might be a VR viewer for the Oculus Rift or some such, where you can use the head tracking to look around while the video is playing. Maybe I could try to write one some day if I never find it, but it must exist already...
When you plug in a USB cable, you have a choice to make it operate as a UVC camera, which doesn't seem to work; or as USB mass storage, which does work (then it's just acting as a microSD reader).
While skiing, it's important to keep the camera warm (or at least the battery I suppose) if you want to use it intermittently. I had no trouble recording an hour straight, if I started it right away before it had a chance to cool down: then it was able to keep itself warm, inside the waterproof case (which I was using mainly to protect the camera in case I crashed; I'm a beginner, so that was happening a lot at first). You never get more than one hour from this battery. But if I left it on my helmet, turned off, then tried to use it later, it would be too cold. If I wanted to wait until after the warmup runs to start recording after I felt like I was skiing well enough to bother recording, I had to wrap it in something soft to avoid scratches and carry it in a pocket in such a way that my body heat could keep it warm.
If you want a spare battery, well, why doesn't this site sell them? Surely that could be negotiated with the manufacturer. Anyway I scoured the net and all I could find was this Domezan battery, which is apparently identical: https://www.amazon.com/DOMEZAN-Action-Camera-V1-Battery/dp/B077933RXF/ I just think the price does not need to be that high, like nearly half as much as the camera...
The advertised Symax 360 app only crashes on my phone, and many others are reporting crashes in Play Store reviews, too. There is also an XDV360 app in the store, which never manages to connect to this camera.
I enabled wifi on the camera, and connected from my Linux laptop; DHCP assigned 192.168.100.198 to my laptop, and the camera is at 192.168.100.1. First tried port 80 from the browser; it reports an error. So I ran an nmap port scan. There are ports 53, 80 and 6666 - that's it. Port 53 is supposed to be dnsmasq. When connecting to port 6666 via nc, the camera sends back a few bytes repeatedly: ab cd 00 00 00 00 01 12, every few seconds. Not sure what that is, maybe some sort of command channel that could be used for remote control if only we knew what to send.
There's a lot of unfulfilled potential here: it should be possible to use it as a USB webcam for video conferencing, that's one thing I was hoping for. It should be possible to remote-control it either via an app over wifi, or via some sort of command channel over USB. (Undoubtedly, enabling wifi would reduce the battery life even more, on both the camera and your phone at the same time. If it worked, that is.) It might be nice to have motion detection in firmware, and use it for watching birds or wildlife or something, but ah well that's too much to ask for I guess.
It's amazing that they managed to put such a high-resolution sensor into this for such a low price, though.