Cig lighter phone charger won’t supply the 5v? I’d have thought the camera mount and enclosure would take the most effort. Raspberry pi zero with their camera accessory would be the main camera.

That’s pretty cool! Any hardware info? I had thought a diy dashcam project would be most about hardware (rpi zero and 3d printed enclosure maybe) with the software being relatively simple. Using an old phone might be another approach.

Do the police take your dash cam if they pull you over? Does that show on their own badge cam?

Streaming live video takes a lot of bandwidth and connectivity from a car can be intermittent, but maybe it’s enough to send a timestamped hash every few seconds, so there is tamper evidence in case of a deletion.

Anyway, deleting video through a dashcam user interface is like deleting a file on a computer: basically a little bit of metadata is overwritten but the underlying data can usually be mostly recovered with filesystem repair or forensic tools. To really delete it for sure you have to either destroy the media or use special tools to overwrite the data blocks. Or just running the camera for a long time (to make sure the freed blocks get re-used) might do it.

You could also stream to another phone or computer tucked away elsewhere in the car, unless you expect the whole car to be seized.

Dash cams do this continuously I thought. Good? Bad? IDK.

I hadn’t heard of that comment, which wasn’t as dumb as it sounds, though some obvious solutions were overlooked and the phrasing wasn’t great.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.edu/

I’ve used nextcloud for this but it’s not great. I’m sure there are better alternatives.

Command line mplayer has been plenty for me.