Sorry for making this an Ask the Dashcam owner thread (but I don’t really think it’s hijacking too far off topic)…
I went away this week & drove 1000 miles/16 hrs roundtrip. If I caught something during the trip I would have had no way to download it until I get home. Is there a way to save a segment so that it doesn’t get overridden / how many hours will they record before overwriting?
Do they come with/is it easy to get a second power cable (for use in rental cars)?
It depends on th model, but in my case yes. You can hit a button to section off a chunk of time (5 minutes IIRC), that won’t be overwritten until you go back and remove the block. You can also briefly interrupt the video recording to take pretty his res still pics with it.
And if you install the max memory cards (2 x 128gb SD micro cards), you’ll have more than 24 hours of recording time even at the max resolution.
Oh, and there are some models (not mine) that can communicate by wifi with your phone so you could transfer a file and mail it somewhere (except probably anything more than a couple of seconds high res would make your attachment too big for gmail.
There’s usually a button you can press to save the segment. However, if it’s likely to be used as evidence, you’re better off taking the SD card out and putting in a replacement.
Reputable accident reconstructionists are really good at trig. And they also have no qualms about going to the accident site. Give them some footage and a reasonable description of where the accident happened and the all your secrets will be known. They’re engineers. The more difficult the problem, the more excited they get about solving it. 
There are people who just drive, and dashcam their trip.
You could take a quick jaunt Up North, speed it up, add some comments and throw in some techno tunage. And there you are! You can tell people at parties that you’re a filmmaker!
Here’s one from Arnold, California. Yeah, that was one of the more interesting ones…
I was first introduced to these with a boring one where a guy drives from Madison to Green Bay… and makes comments like “Here the interstate bypasses Columbus, WI, so we don’t get to see the Christopher Columbus Museum or the old train station or the brewery…” (So, you just made a boring drive less entertaining?)
But, hey, if you’re taking a trip anyways, download the drive and share it. At least that way you’ll have something worth getting the camera for, even if you don’t get to film any accidents.
And you won’t have to follow armored cars around, hoping to catch a heist.
As I mentioned in another thread (the one on hobbies you’re sure no one else has), lately I’ve gotten really into watching these sorts of videos, for reasons that I do not entirely understand myself. Yes, there are hundreds of them on YouTube! Most of them are of fairly ordinary drives, and should not intrinsically be very interesting.
And yet I can’t look away!!
Oh look, my favorite topic. Been using them for years.
Caught a bicyclist struck by a van door opening. Van operator tried lying about it until I showed the cops the video.
I think one of the nicer benefits I have enjoyed over the years is that the dash cam reminds *me *to behave too, which makes me a better driver overall.
Back when I was running a 1999 Suburban for my work truck in DC I had 5 fender benders in one year, none of which were my fault. Three times the other guy lied and tried to blame me. I just uploaded the video to YouTube private setting, emailed the link to the insurance adjuster and the problem went away every time.
Regarding drive videos, I did a similar thing on a boat last year - ran a GoPro for 45 minutes shooting video of my family and my sister and her husband running two Boston Whalers through the marshes near Chincoteague, VA. My dad who doesn’t get on the water much anymore ended up enjoying the video tremendously.
Too late to add - here’s one where I attached a GoPro to a truck in the convoy delivering a streetcar in DC.
More stupid shit to watch. At 14:40 they scraped the bridge (no damage).
Often when I visit my father he shows me the “dashcam” video he took of parts of our trip to Disney World (Michigan to Florida) in December 1981. I have no idea how my mother had room to sit in the front seat with that big, giant behemoth of a camera back then. :eek:
Good point - what jurisdictions forbid those? (I know Virginia does).
Do radar guns detect radar detectors?
Interesting. Is the van operator legally at fault if the door-opening was just an accident? I mean, I’ve heard of deliberate “dooring” which is a dick move at best, but in that video I didn’t get the sense that it was deliberate, just careless.
Do these cameras have the ability to automatically upload videos (or manually based on, say, pushing a button) using your phone or other means? I can see a contentious situation escalating to where an at-fault person tries to snatch / disable / destroy the camera before the videos can be backed up.
What an idiot. All road users are supposed to be watchful for things like vehicle doors opening, and that includes cyclists. If the driver hadn’t lied about it, then it would have been 100% the cyclist’s fault.
There’s a dashcam thread on another messageboard where a similar incident occurred: a police officer was involved and the officer deleted the dashcam footage.