Car camera?

[SilentDeath]

Just finished watching getaway in stockholm 4

also recently there has been a lot of car vandalism around here, and I think this would be a lot more effective than having an alarm...
my car also has the ford PATS thing, so Im very hppy that it wouldnt get stolen (although there is probably a way round it, I wouldnt expect anyone thats experienced enough to know a way round it, to be interested in a 12 year old tin of rust + bad engine).

Anyway loads of cameras on ebay and shops for £15-40 delivered + one of these http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=2632 should work quite well maybe take a week or two to fill up a large hdd...
only issue is I would need a second battery to prevent it going flat, but I have plans for how that would work. a few diodes and it would charge normally but not kill the main battery.

Is this a good idea? If I decide to do it, ill be spending about £100 total for all the bits.


My dad also mentioned the legal issue that it probably wouldnt be accepted as evidence in court, but I disagree.
However my car was dented last week, if I had a camera pointing forwards, would almost definatly have seen what done it and got a number plate.
+ I have no idea if its legal to have a CCTV like camera in car? but then I could just have it on when driving rather than leaving it on all the time.


! it seems the IAM is recommending a car camera product, although it seems to only record 20 seconds worth before deleting it if no event happens.. which is a bit pointless and only active whilst driving. It has a panic button which possibly causes lots of accidents with people trying to press it rather than swerve out the way...

[XA04]

Sounds good in a sense. They might just break in to nick the camera and HDD though?

[SilentDeath]

Sounds good in a sense. They might just break in to nick the camera and HDD though?

if all they do is break the window and nick the camera, ill be happy.. good doors with everything on them cost little from people breaking cars (im after a passneger door for £30 just a little far to travel)

hdd could be put in a steel box, wielded to the boot.. but thats maybe a little ott... I think the answer would be for it all to be well hidden.

Slight problem though, the recorder I wanted, has a max bit rate of 181kB/s xvid, Im thinking thats a little low...?
edit: 500gb hdd, at 181kb/s would fit over a MONTH of video.!!!!!!!!

The next option seems to be a full size set top box type recorder (hdd/dvd/vhs) except for that will use far too much power to be on all the time + wouldnt have enough space to record 24/7.

Theres a few small PVR boxes that use flash cards, but again probably wouldnt last long enough in memory, but with a 4gb card it might last a day or two..?

In which case it might be better to look at a cheaper miniDV type thing (about £50 doesnt need seperate camera) - that would also limit where I can put it.

[J4MES]

want a better idea? a wifi-enabled-mini-hidden-camera-system which initiates on break-in and records the thief as he nick your mota... would only work at home/office car park though...

[Vimeous]

How the **** did I do that?! LOL

[schmunk]

Wrong thread Vimeous..?

[Saracen]

...

My dad also mentioned the legal issue that it probably wouldnt be accepted as evidence in court, but I disagree.
However my car was dented last week, if I had a camera pointing forwards, would almost definatly have seen what done it and got a number plate.....

Your Dad is very likely right. Admissibility is a legally complex area, though with the repeal of s.69 of PACE, it's a lot more likely than it would have been. However, the general rules of admissibility still apply, and any footage will still have to satisfy the requirements for admissibility, and not fall foul of any of the disqualifying criteria, like hearsay (and yes, that can apply to CCTV, and isn't just spoken statements).

A lot will depend on the quality of the footage, and on what it shows. But there are also a whole raft of issues about the chain of evidence from the original recording to the court, so encryption, watermarking, etc will be issues, and the real possibility that ANY digital image can be fairly easily altered is a serious concern.

The rules will be different for admissibility in a criminal trial to those in a civil dispute, but you should take the view that any CCTV footage you produce will face a very serious risk of being inadmissible.


However ..... it's one thing for such footage to be court-admissible, and it's entirely another for police to use it to track and catch offenders. If, for instance, you caught someone's face or car reg number on CCTV, police wouldn't necessarily need to use it in court, or even be allowed to use it, for it to be useful.

Think about the prosecution process :-

Stage 1 - Identify culprits
Stage 2 - Gather evidence/proof
Stage 3 - Get conviction in court.

Admissibility only really becomes an issue at stage 3. If CCTV is used in stage 1, it doesn't need to go before a court. Suppose police have blood on glass from a broken window. CCTV footage may give them a car reg number and a face. Given that, they may have solved Stage 1 - they now know WHO they're after. They may then be able to gather sufficient evidence to prove the case, now that they know who they're looking for, such as a DNA match.

So if you put a cheap CCTV in your car, will it be used in court? Maybe, but doubtful. But that doesn't mean it won't be useful anyway. This does, however, assume that the crime is sufficiently serious that you can get the police to take much notice, or to devote much time and money to it. Anyone like to put the odds on police running DNA analysis if the crime in question is a broken car window and a nicked stereo? No, me neither.

[SilentDeath]

I think the quality will be far better than most cctv (most cameras are old and crappy b&w things from 20 years ago..). This is the one I bought http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...MEWN:IT&ih=004
Havent recived it yet though. When I do I will post a few videos just to show the quality (of my driving )


Having a large problem with finding an adequate recorder (SCAN are far from helpfull and I think after their last email I will *never* consider using them again. You would get more informative replys from overclockers with RMA in the subject...!). Looks like I will have to get a SD card based one, with motion detection, but I still doubt if they are much better video quality than the one scan sell.

want a better idea? a wifi-enabled-mini-hidden-camera-system which initiates on break-in and records the thief as he nick your mota... would only work at home/office car park though...

This is wireless, hope it will reach the 50-70 meters from car to house.... but I doubt anyone skilled enough (defeat ford's PATS or some kind of trailer required) to nick my car would bother (its a rusty fiesta worth maybe £400-800... much less if any windows get broken)

If you lived next to a road, you could easly set up a cheap recorder to wireless record from your house, 24/7... very worth while... but then the chances of it getting vandalised are a lot less.

[SilentDeath]

camera arrived today

the range is rated 100 meters so should reach from car to home (60 meters). the picture quality is good.

I will try to convince my brother to let me plug it into his laptop then we can see what its like when we drive upto derby on thursday.

[SilentDeath]

http://jellard.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Car%20cam.mpg

range isnt quite as good as I hoped. parking nearer doesnt seem to help but I do almost have line of sight there, except for a huge tree in the way
Managed to get it quite well hidden though + easy to remove (2 screws)... angle is almost right, going to point it slightly more upwards...

[Gr44]

Er... I'm thinking I don't have the right codec... looks... not so great to me! I could just about make out a car in a few frames... lol loads of lines and things all over it

[Butcher]

That's what I'm getting, looks like a duff feed.

[SilentDeath]

yep as i said its a bit out of range if I move it around a bit the picture becomes stable but fuzzy.. if i move it a few inches inside the house window picture compleatly disapears... but in range picture is perfect (though little bit of sensor noise as always..)

not sure if theres any way round it, maybe a better antenna... or I will have to buy a recorder as i originally planned (none of them do into any detail about recording quality... reason i haven't bought one yet)

[filbert]

Same here looks poo

[SilentDeath]

i have been playing with some new toys not very car related tough - sorry

I bought the hard disk recorder (sumvision zengo) and very impressed with it so far. quality is good and it plays several xvid films perfectly (although havent connected speaks so no idea if its in sync..) in good quality.
The menus are good also.

I then decided to play with my old psone 5.5 inch lcd. I bought this few years ago with the intent of mounting it in pc and modding it to vga, for a cheap second monitor - which never really worked too well.
Hacked a new composite connector onto it and tidyed up my soldering and it works awesomely - I think I might put this in the car with the recorder.


One annoying thing about the recordeer - it needs fat32 partitions... no embedded device is going to use ntfs for very good resons. So now I have a 250gb hard disk, which win2k/xp will only let me partition into 32gb sizes for fat32 use
Not sumvisions fault, though I know need to find some software that can do it without to much effort ( = take hdd out of enclosure if enclosure doesnt work on with a boot cd..)


Only a few things left to do for it now...

need to make a powersupply for it
find a couple of very cheap car batterys (whole system will be about 20w camera 2w/recorder 6w/hdd 9w +3w of losses)
fabricate a case for the lcd
find somewhere to put it all THEN its done.

[SilentDeath]

small clip from a 44min drive.

http://jellard.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/REC_004c.avi

camera was focused at about 2 meters so everything is a bit blurrry :/ its hard to focus it on a 5" screen.. not that you can notice with the bitrate this low.. the original was 40mb/minute so was trying to keep file small