Safe Speed Forums

Well done smeggy, I'm impressed.

I won't say I have changed my mind because I have a built-in aversion to being spied, on even if I am innocent. I like to pick my nose and scratch my arse in private.

If the system was voluntary and up to individual motorists then it will stand or fall on it's own popularity. For example, getting a reduction on your car insurance if you have the system fitted.

There have been occasions when I wish a police car had been around when some idiot has done something particularly dangerous and got away with it. And I suppose more police cars is wishful thinking so perhaps cameras are the only way to go.

I know some cars already have black boxes which record the last 30 minutes of your driving but they obvioulsy don't record why you drove as you did, which might show up on cameras.

I will mull over our exchange of views and hope we have stimulated some thought amongst others as well.

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Shooting is good for you and too good for some people.

I have to admit, I've thought about putting a camera on my car ever since I heard the case about the rally driver who had a claim against him for rear ending someone on a motorway after returning from an event.

Turns out he was the camera car that day and there was still tape rolling in it, and the guy he hit had pulled across with a few feet to spare, then jammed on the brakes.

The only person reveiwing the film would be me though, unless I needed it to prove something to my insurance (who are a bit more flexible about digital photography than the courts are)

It is fairly trivial to do. My Car PC is about 95% complete, just needs a failed fan fixing and some in situ testing, and the software setting up. Plugging in a USB webcam and capturing images would not be too much more work. Many people already use similar systems to have a reversing camera on their car (though obviously without the recording aspect)

The possibilities for abuse are endless though if the system becomes legally admissible. Think of the most obnoxious busybody neighbour you have ever had. The one who calls out the police if your washing machine doesn't finish until 10:05PM. The one who reports peoples project cars as abandoned despite being on their driveway. Now imaging that person having nothing better to do than following you around for days on end waiting to catch you slightly clipping the give-way line when turning right into a minor road so that he can report you. No thanks.

My camera? I might put the videos of the more comical bits of stupidity up on a website for other people to laugh at, probably with blurred out number plates.

I've actually had a camera installed in my car in the past, as part of my university dissertation a few years ago. That was a one camera + gps system, but adding additional cameras is easy. The GPS means you have speed recording, but not as accurately as a calibrated speedo.

I still have the software I wrote for it, it wouldn't take much to modify it so that I had a rolling recording of the last 5 minutes that was saved out if I braked suddenly or pressed a button. As it isn't recording constantly, it uses next to no storage space.

The reason I don't actively run it is because
a) The webcam I used looked daft duct-taped to the dashboard
b) I wasn't sure of the legality of recording other vehicles, including their registration plates.

Cost of equipment is 1 laptop (doesn't need to be anything special as long as it has USB ports), 40 quid each for decent webcams and 70 for a GPS device.


As for submissability as evidence, I'd say it's about as fakeable (am I making these words up?) as the cameras the police use. I could fake it, given a few weeks with the staff and equipment at ILM.

Well the laptop isn't an issue as I now have a working desktop computer installed in the car dashboard (must check the legality of this at some point, it probably becomes illegal if I attach a DVD drive and install playback software)

I'd be interested in your software though. Which OS is it for? You could probably sell it on the various Car PC forums.

If you burnt it to write-once media shortly after the accident and got an attenting police officer to sign it, would that be enough?

It's written in Java, so not the most userfriendly ever, but will run on any OS.

I'll have to look into modifying it if people are interested. Getting a police officer to sign a CD (one 5 minute stretch from several cameras, plus the GPS data would easily fit on a CD) would probably count.

I'd need someone with legal knowledge to tell me if this falls foul of the CCTV and Data Protection laws before I sell anything though.

I always thought it was ok to take photos and/or film in a public place.

If you do decide to develop this though, digital-car.co.uk and mp3car.com are the forums you probably want to pitch it to.

How the hell did you get USB video capture working in Java though, especially at a speed where it would actually be useful.

It's actually quite easy to use one of the drivers in the JMF to get a video feed. The hardest part was then extracting still images out of it (necessary for the project, but thankfully not for this).

Java is fast these days. A 350MHz PC should be able to cope with at least 4 cameras.

You can get a Hard Drive recorded for around £190.00 which would film everything in front of up to four cameras for around two weeks.

You can get colour or B/W cameras, with or without sound.

Inobtrusive colour bullet cameras can be found at around £80.00 each.

Cameras run on 12V but the Hard Drive is 230ac unless you want to spend a lot of money. You can get a converter to run 230ac from a car battery from most good camping or caravan shops.

The four channel hard drive can be time and date initialised.

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If you're right, did your heels in
If you're wrong, admit it!

Sink the scameraships
Give us back our Police Force

The hard drive in your PC is running from +12V and +5V (the latter can easily be derived from the former)

If it's a laptop HD you only need 5V (I know because I killed one of mine with 12V by connecting it up wrong in the car)

So far the current one has survived in-car use, including a bit of *ahem* spirited driving while being read from for MP3 playback.

I'm still concerned about this being a java + USB based solution though. USB causes a fairly high CPU load and then Java certainly wont help, especially with all the other stuff going on. The 1ghz Via C3 I'm using is supposedly equivalent to a 450MHz Celeron

I believe you need a special licence to use CCTV in a public place. If you have a CCTV camera system on your house you have to ensure it doesn't actually film people passing outside your property.

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Shooting is good for you and too good for some people.

So what's the definition of CCTV then? Does a USB webcam meet this definition?

What if you just happened to have an onboard camera on your track car and forgot to switch it off after leaving the racetrack? Would the evidence be thrown out of court?

I always remember hearing of a case which was pretty much that. rally car left the onboard camera rolling, and some guy on the motorway on the way home decided to make a few quid by undertaking, cutting in with a foot or so to spare then slamming on the brakes, thanks to the camera footage, that person was found to be at fault even though it was a rear end impact.

I am not sure of all the reasons but there must be some restrictions on exactly who can film who. You can't just set up a camera in the street and film everybody who walks past, or drives past for that matter. And if you can't set it up in the street does that apply to setting it up in a car?

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Shooting is good for you and too good for some people.

I'm not aware of any restrictions on filming or photographing in a public place.

Got fed up with dog crap in front garden - dog warden said if i could get description of dog they might help.
Cut long story short - rigged up video cam to see front garden , advised them - got a response from local council advising me to check with local police - .
Might be worth checking - unless of course local council is PC crazy.

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

You are asking people to sub-concentrate on video editing
whilst driving? To catch... dangerous drivers. Please, put the
straight jacket on me now

If you refer to pressing a button once sometime near an event without ever viewing the video stream as 'editing', then I'll happily put the jacket on you

I get what you are saying... or what I mean is,
you press the button (can be on steering wheel)
and it saves the last ten seconds and next ten
seconds each side of the moment you pressed
the button, saving 20 seconds with the incident,
provided you react within 10 seconds which is
very easy to do then yes, seems like a good idea
to me apart from, I don't agree with people being
continually monitored.

As so many people are saying, it is uncontitutional
and completely against what freedom is meant to be
about if we are going to be filmed contstantly.

Unrelated but... I have heard stories of cameras in
school toilets... thats disgusting I think you'll agree.
We are being conditioned to accept this sort of thing,
when the very basis of any decent society is that
each individual has his or her own privacy.

it is not a case of having nothing to hide but a case
of having the right to privacy anf the right to not be
filmed on camera. Remember Naomi Campbell
who stepped out of a clinic, got her picture taken
and sued the paper that published the pictures?
Its a different thing altogether to the Government
filming you but "other drivers" filming you? Who then
owns the video since your image is on it and you
could be driving somewhere extremely embarassing like
a clinic, rehab like Naomi Campbell, then that video comes
under the same scrutiny as any other like it? It is not the
point to continually film every second of everyones lives,
but to cut crime down.

If we are going to monitor anyone it is our "Leader"
Tony Bliar and anyone else that can incrementally
change our way of life, who should be continually
monitored 24/7. If they are not prepared to do that
then they are not even eligible in my eyes to do the
job. Then maybe we would see why road rage happens.

A failing Government is, I think, just one of the perfectly
valid reasons WHY people are annoyed, the fact that they
are "driving whilst annoyed" and us then labelling this "road rage"
is fine but these people are annoyed people, period. The road has
nothing to do with it. What happens in a bar brawl "house rage"
then that spills out onto the car park what is it then "car park rage"
oh, give me a break! I must be guilty of "net rage" one thousand
times over, what you gonna do, fine me eighty thousand pounds?
I don't even have EIGHT pounds at the moment.

I understand your privacy concerns, but we already know we have a significant problem with bad drivers on our roads (conversely, not many children die in school toilets); unfortunately, it’s prohibitevly expensive to have trafpol everywhere all the time. A balance is needed but we’re way short of it. Also, drivers are always being monitored by other drivers anyway, this is part of hazard perception. For this idea, the difference is that only bad instances of driving, as decided by a (preferably trained) peer, are flagged for further examination by the authorities, all other footage is automatically deleted.

I don’t disagree with your explanation of the roots of ‘road rage’, some people are certainly more susceptible to ‘red mist’ moments; this can’t be helped - unless we’re all forced to take drugs a la the film Equilibrium. Also, we can’t ban from driving all those who are capable of rage (and how do you define ‘capable’?). Poor/inconsiderate driving (by the rager or ragee) will amplify any latent rage beyond containment; so we should be encouraging drivers to drive considerately. IMO I think such a monitoring system is a good balance and I would welcome it (but only as I have described it).

The way I'd set the system up is to have a rolling log of about 5-30 minutes after this time the video will drop out the bottom of the system and be discarded, therefore simulating a continuous loop tape.

When the button is pressed, the current contents of the log are moved to another file and a new one is started.

I can then, at my leisure, take the dumped file, remove all the bits not relating to the accident I was just in, burn it to DVD and hand it to plod or insurance as necessary. This is different from CCTV systems where everything is recorded no matter what.