GoPro Plus, I dunno…
We just did a 12 days, 1190 KM, bicycle tour around Taiwan. Along with the trip, I’ve rented a GoPro Hero 8. Last GoPro I used was Hero 4 Black, although the video quality is great, not having good enough sound and extra bulky water proof case are the main reasons I stopped using it. And when I brought it along with my first cycle around Taiwan, even with 3-ways stabilizer, most of the footage mounted on bike are unusable, still way too shaky.
Now that Hero 8 comes water proof without case, a better quality microphone and a build-in electronic stabilizer, I decided to rent one to document the trip. I’ve heard about over-heating issue which I would expect especially in the heat of Taiwan.
Since the rental only provided one 128GB memory card and not wanting to buy another card just for this trip, I needed someway to backup the videos/photos and clean up storage for more recording. After researching a few options, GoPro Plus subscription from GoPro is picked. It’s a premium service that provides “unlimited” upload of GoPro recordings AND insurance for GoPro that will replace the camera maximum of twice a year. I only needed the backup service since Taiwan isn’t one of country that supports insurance.
With 30-days free trial, I used the bike trip as testing stone. Now that I think of it, I really shouldn’t use real trip as experiment in case of any hiccup because hiccup did happen.
I had issue with setting up GoPro Plus on the camera, mainly because it was a rental and the camera was associated with another account. The error message just says “Unable to Fetch GoPro Plus Account” and I couldn’t find information regarding this message.
Anyway, for future reference, it meant this camera was associated with some account that no longer exists or have disassociate with this camera. And the way to re-associate with new account is: Factory Reset. Once reset, GoPro app on the phone will be able to pass new account to the camera so when camera’s wifi is connected every night, it will upload new recording to GoPro Plus service.
In theory, this works great. Once uploaded, just wipe the memory card clean and do more recording tomorrow. However, I found that some videos are missing from GoPro Plus media library while exist in the memory card.
Now, this service suddenly became scary. If it couldn’t backup reliably, I can’t use this service. Problem with this is that when I upload the missing video manually through web browser, it actually recognizes the video is already in library, but YET….it can’t be found in app or in website media library.
This is the first problem. Then here comes second issue, downloading the uploaded media.
12 days bicycle trip yield about 900 files, about 220GB. I am not sure about others, but my phone doesn’t have 220GB free space and I can’t edit all the video with phone. I needed some other way to download the files.
There are two ways, GoPro legacy software ‘Quik’ and download from site. Quik can multi-select all the files and download via queue, however, it has very slow download speed. Which I don’t understand, the media is hosted on AWS, I don’t understand why it’s so slow. So that left with last option, download from GoPro Plus website.
Although the speed is much better, it’s buggy when downloading multiple files. When selected multiple files to download, the site will issue download request to AWS one at a time. However, it doesn’t wait for current request to start download before issuing the next request. In this case, current request will be canceled. As the result download will also miss files.
There is a work around. When seeing the error, right click on the request to open request in new tab which will reissue the download the request.
Problem is, I had several hundred files to download. I thought of writing some sort of script to do this, but…I can’t run the code on GoPro Plus site, so instead I just suck it up and download/redownload until all medias are fetched.
But that pretty much ends my hope for using current form of GoPro Plus service. Also, when uploading media to GoPro Plus, it messes with timezone, so files captured in Taipei time afternoon on Sep 2, will show up as Sep 3 media. This is a big no-no.
At the end, it could be my computer/phone that has these particular issues, but nevertheless, it doesn’t work out. Hope future experience will improve. So unless one lives in a country that support insurance replacement, either bring additional memory card or some ways to copy files off memory card to somewhere else seemed to be better choice.
