New 4K Videos and Telemetry

Friday afternoon we debuted our very first full featured 4K telemetry recorded video from our run into California on December 14, 2022. In case you missed it, you can find it here: BigRigTravels 4K Telemetry Video over the Sierra Mountains in California.

In the past, we made it a point to record in 1080p or 4K, the places that were so beautiful but were full of buffer zones. Recording these videos allowed folks to still see the areas, but do so in much higher quality and uninterrupted by signal loss that occurs during the live broadcast.

It is important to note that while we do have a crude version of telemetry on screen during our broadcasts, it is a whole different situation to be able to extract all the necessary data LIVE and have it match reality. When we record these videos in 4K, we are also able to record a whole host of telemetry data that we can then edit and display in real-time as the video was recorded. The process to extract and translate the data into visible gauges and on screen visuals, build and place the information, then render it as a whole file, then upload to YouTube is very time consuming. All told, the video we showed you today was 49GB of video data and took about 20 hours to accomplish. Obviously, if it takes this long for a single 1 hour and 45 minute video with on screen data, think of the extreme resources it would take to be able to do it LIVE. While I would absolutely love to be able to bring all the graphics and data on the 4K videos to our LIVE broadcasts, it literally is impossible at this time. Could it happen one day? Who knows. Remember, when we started out broadcasting in 2008, we could only have a viewing size of 320×320 and only TEN simultaneous viewers. We have come a long way since the beginning, and we will always do our very best to stay on top of technology and bring it to you as soon as it’s physically available. It is a completely different situation to be driving a truck across the country and chasing data towers all along the way to send our signal from the windshield – add the gps data, roadsigns, locations, weather information, etc – than it is to take a hard recording and add all the available data and let it compute for a whole day.

We choose to upload our longer videos and make them as Premieres on YouTube. This means that you – and everybody else – will see the video for the first time, at the same time. You can chat and all comment about what you see. CHAT is LIVE, but the video is recorded. You can find the location, record date, etc in the title and or description box below the videos. It is just a nice way to bring our Road Crew community together and view some great scenery all at once and communicate with each other during our time off. This should help those suffering from BRT Withdrawals when we take a few days off:)

One thing you need to be aware of – Even though the 4K Premieres are actually recorded in true 4K, YouTube only shows them as 1080p DURING the premiere. After the initial showing is completed, YouTube makes available the full 4K version.

Hopefully this helps explain things better and helps you to understand why we DO, or DON’T do, something in certain situations. Hang tight, as we approach our 2 million mile mark, we are currently building our new Celebration Website chock full of helpful information. Yup, we are very close to getting Starlink up and going as well. As soon as technology advances, you can be sure we will be right there to grab it! There’s a very good reason we’ve been broadcasting from coast to coast and border to border since 2008 and lasted 15+ years without missing a beat!