Originally Posted by
dougmc
I've got a Contour GPS and the GPS sucks. It takes ages to acquire a lock and is quite insensitive compared to other GPSs I have -- if it's in my car, it will never get a lock unless it's actually on the dash, for example. Also the GPS drains the battery quite a bit even if it's not recording.
I have two ContourGPS's, and I turned off the GPS on both of them in Storyteller. It's inaccurate, it locks up the camera, and like you said it drains the battery quicker. The cameras work flawlessly now that that buggy GPS is off.
I want to give a heads-up to GoPro HD Hero2 owners about the ProTune firmware "upgrade". It sucks! Yes, you get ultra-high resolution HD video, but that comes at a price. People have reported freezing and the camera recording for only a few seconds at a time, even with a good Class 10 card.
I did the upgrade a few days ago. When I looked at the audio/video properties of the test videos in Windows, I noticed that the audio bitrate was reduced from 48 kHz to 32 kHz, which caused the sound quality to suck even more than it already does with earlier firmware versions. There was always a bit of aliasing in the audio even at 48 kHz, but at least it was tolerable. With a 32 kHz bitrate there was even more aliasing and the audio sounded like garbage!
I found a video on YouTube explaining how to downgrade the firmware to the previous version, and now my camera is back to normal.
I have a
thread I started on MTBR with links to a sample of the video with crappy sound after the ProTune update, and the how-to video for downgrading the firmware. I also cut-and-pasted GoPro's unhelpful response to my email asking for a firmware downgrade. Google to the rescue! If I wasn't able to downgrade the firmware I would have returned the camera to REI.