Garmin Virb Orphaned?
I've been using my Virb basic and Virb Elite for over three years now and, up until lately, have been very pleased. They take great 1080p video. The main thing I like is that their cross section is much smaller than the GoProp when mounted outside the aircraft. The 3 hr. battery life is insufficient for a long cross country, but I've fixed that with an external battery for my tail cam. Both the battery and memory card will now handle six hours. Several problems with Garmin's free editing software have popped up lately, though, which may force me to switch to GoPro (or something else).
The most annoying problem is that their editing software chokes on speeds over 127 Kts. When my speed increases above that, the display starts over at 1 Kt and counts up from there. It could be a problem with my computer or their editing software, but I've politely asked their tech support on the Garmin Virb Edit forum but they don't even answer.
See Thread. It's pretty clear that aviation isn't a priority for the Garmin video department, as evidenced by their software having no feet-per-minute option for vertical speed; Many pilots have requested that, with no response. Apparently Garmin is all into motorcycle racing, skiiing, bicycling and fitness, but not aviation.
A bigger problem is that Garmin has "moved on" from the original Virb cameras and are now pushing their 360 degree cameras and 4K cameras. They've pushed several "upgrades" to their Virb Edit software to support those new formats, but the upgrades messed up the editing of the original virb cameras. What the new v5.x.x software did was to offload a lot of the computing requirements onto the GPU (video card) to take the burden off the CPU. I had to go out and buy a new video card just so I could keep editing my old videos. I still had to revert back to an old version 4 of Virb Edit.
Last week, come to find out, Garmin is no longer manufacturing some of the mounts for the Garmin Virb Basic and Virb Elite cameras. The "flush mount" for my tail cam got damaged and when I went to buy another one, I found that they are "unavailable" in the U.S.
I really like these cameras, but it seems they're orphans now.