Car cam/Blackbox for android

Soldato
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I know this could go in the android app thread but i thought it maybe worth starting a new thread to see what people think about this.

As any of you that drive know the are more and more idiots on the road nower days. After being the victim of a crash last year where the driver was 100% at fault i got shafted for a 50/50 decision because i had no proof or witnesses. I felt sick at this as it put mut my premiums up quite a bit so i rang my insurer and asked if a video recorder in the car would count as proof and they said it would.

I looked into some dash cams but they are very expensive. So i decided to look into Android software and i think i have come up with a realy nice and quick solution.


Now the first problem would be having to set up a car mount every time you drive. Thanks to mrk's great DIY dash holder thread http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=16992427#post16992427 it literally takes seconds to mount the phone into the cradle. The thing is so light weight and un bulky its extremley easy to store.

On the software side check out a program called autoboy blockbox https://market.android.com/details?id=com.jeon.blackbox

Its awesome and uses your GPS connection to display the speed and the location data at all times (even more proof to the insurers to show your speed at the time of accident and also the location of incident). You can set the program to record all footage or for it to only save footage when you click the save button. You can tell the program to only use 1GB of space meaning it will start to overwrite older videos once the space has ran out.

screen



Really nice software and it works perfectly and its not a hassle to set up. Oh make sure you have a car charger becuase it will drink battery.

Anyone else use any car cam software for android? I can upload some sample footage if people want to see it.


EDIT: Mods feel free to move to motors if you feel it should go there
 
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I tried out this software the other day on my SGS2, still need to play a bit more but it seems ok, saying that I did two runs to work using it, first was with 640x480 video and it worked fine, then tried 720p high quality the next day and the video is all messed up (wasn't whilst it was recording but trying to watch it back is odd),

Also not really sure why it takes up quite so much 'battery', even with the car charger I lost 1-2% over an hour long drive, and most of that was with the screen off, I'm sure it shouldn't be that hard on the battery ¬_¬
 
You lost 1-2% whilst recording video over an hour and you're concerned? :p

Not concerned exactly, but that was with the charger remember and nothing else, what if I wanted to use satnav at the same time (both extra processing and screen being on) that'd drain the battery rather rapidly I'd imagine...

More importantly I'm just not sure it's coded well, eg the battery drain is due to 'bad' coding rather than an inherent drain due to what it's doing, I haven't looked closely at exactly what it could be doing though (and not sure I could be bothered anyway :p)
 
Not concerned exactly, but that was with the charger remember and nothing else, what if I wanted to use satnav at the same time (both extra processing and screen being on) that'd drain the battery rather rapidly I'd imagine...

More importantly I'm just not sure it's coded well, eg the battery drain is due to 'bad' coding rather than an inherent drain due to what it's doing, I haven't looked closely at exactly what it could be doing though (and not sure I could be bothered anyway :p)

Camera, GPS, screen all going at once, data being written to SD card, it's going to take a bit of juice!
 
Well, Camera, GPS, writing to SD and I believe a bit of data as well (for the google maps overlay?) but I did have the screen off,

Essentially that's saying that the Camera uses a chunk more than the display (using google nav so GPS, data and display will charge at a semi-reasonable rate), which is possibly true due to the nature of what it's doing, but I still think it's a bit excessive, again though I've not looked at it in any detail just a hunch...
 
Well, Camera, GPS, writing to SD and I believe a bit of data as well (for the google maps overlay?) but I did have the screen off,

Essentially that's saying that the Camera uses a chunk more than the display (using google nav so GPS, data and display will charge at a semi-reasonable rate), which is possibly true due to the nature of what it's doing, but I still think it's a bit excessive, again though I've not looked at it in any detail just a hunch...

You know what i think this might be a SGS2 thing as my old Desire HD wouldnt lose battery while on charge,

I havent actually noticed it on my SGS2 but on my next trip ill note down the starting battery and then the ending battery
 
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