Road rage camera

[dave]

Have been involved with a road rage incident yesterday (attempted ramming by two lunatics) I just got to wondering whether there is perhaps a miniature tv camera system available with limited (say 1 minute) recording time available (or a diy'able version) for a reasonable cost? It would have been useful yesterday to have simply been able to press a button and capture what happened. Most of the action was in front of me and the video would have been useful to the police I'm sure.

[Huge]

There are cheap solid-state digital video cameras on eBay all the time. For example;

may be legal ramifications, though. Videotaping someone without their consent may be an offence.

(I think I'm going to start keep a list of ways in which this country is becoming a mad-house.)

[Stefek Zaba]

There are lots. They're 'free', if you haven't changed to a new model within the last year (18 months with some places).

They're fixed to the back of mobiles these days, y'see. Just about every phone with a camera will do video capture. Rubbish resolution, won't store more than some tens of seconds (some will take addon memory cards to let you store more).

Economics of mass manufacture and of handset subsidy by mobile-phone operators mean that this is cheaper than just about anything you can d-i-y.

Stefek

[[news]]

not in a public place it isn't

RT

[John Rumm]

There is one I say demonstrated that was mounted in the back of the rear view mirror, that also employied a 30 second fifo. So when you hit the "record" button, it would start recording from 30 seconds *before* you hit the button. That way you can record something that just happened.

It was being developed IIRC as a "black box" type system for accident recording. The above manual record was a facility added on. Not sure if it is in production yet though.

[al]

Surely you can in a public place? Otherwise cameras and video cameras on holiday would be illegal?

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[Mike Barnes]

Surely it can't be long before such systems become commonplace. It doesn't seem unreasonable with today's technology to make it a 30

*minutes* memory, and to also record GPS info (location, speed, date and time). I'd buy one.

[Ian Stirling]

30m at 150kilobytes/second = about 256M of memory. And, as you'd likely want not one, but several cameras (rear, front, sides), it mounts up fast. 1Gb is available as flash, but it'll add a hundred or so quid onto the price of the unit ATM. 30s however would only be a few tens of meg.

And you really don't want to use a hard disk, for various reasons.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Some engine management units record speed, throttle, breaking, etc for post crash diagnosis. The recorded data has been used to convict a driver in the US, where it showed he was speeding and took no avoiding action when he killed someone coming out of a side turning, contrary to what he had been saying in the absence of any whitnesses.

[Jason Judge]

I recently asked the police about this, and they say that there are no restrictions in public places. If mounted on your property, just ensure it does not overlook a school or someone else's property. On the road, I would guess it's free-for-all taping.

-- JJ

[Huge]

Braking.

You're welcome.

[doozer]

I don't think you could use flash memory for the fifo it wouldn't last for more than a few months. There is a limit to the number of writes to each cell in a flash card. It used to be around 10,000 but I believe some modern cards are up to 100,000 (which might make it practical). Computers that run off flash cards use write load balancing to even out the ware on the card but that wouldn't be possible with a video device that used the whole card as a buffer.

[Mike Barnes]

Actually one front-facing camera would be just fine, for me, anyway. And I think I've got a couple of 256Mb flash cards lying around. It would be sensible if, like an ordinary digital still camera, the unit allowed the user to insert any size card according to their budget etc.

I didn't foresee using a hard disk, but I'd be interested to know what those reasons are. The hard disk in my iPod seems to work quite happily (read-only, though) in the glove box.

[nightjar]

The problem is that a cheap system simply won't give you the quality you need for an evidence quality video. Even some commercial CCTV surveillance systems don't give a good enough resolution to be useful. There was a recent case where the Police were able to recognise who stole a computer system, because it was recorded on a webcam, but the evidence was useful mainly because it got the crook to admit his guilt. It would have been difficult to present a case in Court that relied solely on the video.

Most cheap systems give about 370 TV lines, which can be useful when viewed live, but which gives very poor quality recordings. For evidence quality monochrome videos, it is usual these days to work at around 570 TVL.

Colin Bignell

[Huge]

I would dispute that - I've seen the video, and the guy looked full on into the camera, brightly lit and close up.

But more generally, you're right. A friend reviewed the CCTV footage of his car being stolen from Bedford station car park (after the police refused to look at it) and all you could say was "Yes, that's definitely your car being stolen by 4 grey fuzzy vaguely human shaped blobs."

[Owain]

Why use any local memory at all? Just stream the video continuously into the government's video traffic analysis computer, and every car becomes a police camera monitoring the driving of the car in front.

Add a proximity ID card reader to the ignition switch to detect who the driver is ...

Owain

[Owain]

Maybe not in the cited case ;-)

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

They record breaking as well.

[[news]]

there are no problems using hard drives in vehicles.

unless, maybe, a rally car.

RT

[[news]]

£299 it's probably cheaper to diy, as usual, with a sub £80 2 port cam card, a SFF case running on in car 12V with a 80Gb laptop HDD with LitePC OS a

7" display (if required )and a couple of medium resolution bullet cameras.

sourced via the old scrapheap challenge of course.

hth

RT